As it does with nearly every Apple smartphone, tablet and computer that hits shelves, iFixit has torn down an iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro Max to reveal what technological goodies are hidden within. The teardown didn’t reveal too many surprises, overall, but a few interesting things did pop up.
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| From left to right: the iPhones XR, XS Max and 11 Pro Max. |
Before cracking into any of the devices, iFixit teamed up with Creative Electron to X-ray the phones before they were opened up. As seen above, there’s not a millimeter of free space within the frames and although the same general layout was used, there are a few noticeable differences between the iPhone 11 models and the iPhone XS models. Considering the iPhone 11 Pro Max is the most interesting of the devices from a photography standpoint, that’s the teardown we’ll be focusing on here, although the full teardown of the iPhone 11 is available on iFixit.
Most notably, the iPhone 11 Pro Max uses a single-cell L-shaped battery, instead of two separate batteries found inside previous Plus/Max models. Apple also dropped down the logic board, presumably to make room for the much larger three-camera array.
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In ‘Step 6,’ iFixit gets to the camera modules. The team at iFixit also had X-rays performed on the camera modules, which revealed the optical image stabilization on the wide and telephoto camera modules. According to the teardown, iFixit plans on doing a more detailed analysis of the camera unit, so when that goes live we’ll be sure to cover accordingly.
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| The black bars in the two larger camera modules are the OIS units. |
Moving on, the iFixit team digs into the nitty-gritty details of the logic board and all of the individual chips, memory units and sensors within.
At ‘Step 13’ the battery gets some attention and iFixit reveals it was ‘pleasantly surprised to find some relatively repair-friendly features.’ The battery analysis also reveals the battery inside the iPhone 11 Pro Max ‘pumps out 3969 mAh at 3.79 V, for a total of 15.04 Wh […] a whopping 2.96 Wh more than the XS Max battery, and 1.52 Wh less than the Galaxy Note 10+ 5G battery.’ Of course, this increased capacity comes with a slight size increase. The battery inside the iPhone 11 Pro Max is 4.6mm thick and weighs 59.6g, which is 0.7mm thicker and 13g heavier than the dual-cell battery arrangement inside the iPhone XS Max.
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The remainder of the teardown covers the bottom section of the devices, which includes speakers, microphones, charging ports, additional cables and more. iFixit gives the iPhone 11 Pro Max a repairability score of six out of ten, mostly due to the fact that if the back glass cracks the entire device essentially needs to be stripped away to repair it.
Image credits: Courtesy of iFixit
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