Apple Disassemble

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Special thanks to Olivia Marsh and Manveer Wasson for help with the
disassembly and photographs for this article
And this is one of ours, on the operating table:

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Chances for survival? Slim
The first step to disassemble the device is to remove the lower black
plastic piece; heating it up and squeezing a razorblade in there [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]e it not only
possible, but easy:

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Then came the process of removing the brushed aluminum cover, which
wasn't nearly as easy. After a lot of bending, pulling and other
unfathomable things one would do to a brand new iPhone we were left with
this:

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Page 3 The iPhone's Motherboard(s)

The motherboard in the iPhone is very compact; it is actually composed
of two separate PCBs that are sandwiched together.

The upper left hand corner of the picture is the PCB sandwich that
makes the iPhone tick; the black slot you're seeing here is for the SIM
card; the cable port on the lower left of the motherboard appears to be
the LCD interface.
The topmost PCB appears to have the 802.11b/g wireless controller as
well as most of the other microprocessors necessary for the cell phone
aspects of the iPhone:

Note
that we've removed the EMI shield from the top of this PCB layer in
order to show off the individual components.

The
lower PCB layer features the 4GB MLC NAND Flash (made by Samsung), as
well as the iPhone's main processor. Two of the chips on this board have
Apple logos on them, the larger of the two appears to be the iPhone's
ARM processor manufactured by Samsung.

We
suspect that it may be Samsung's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] based on the
ARM1176 core, however some readers have written us stating that it's
more likely to be the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]; judging by
the model numbers on the chip itself, the ARM processor may be a part of
a multi-chip package that includes 1Gbit of system memory, for running
the iPhone's OS. The K4X1G153PC-XGC3 is a Samsung part number,
indicating a 1Gbit memory device, but it is placed on the same package
as the ARM processor itself.

Page 4 Say Goodbye to the Screen

With the motherboard itself pulled apart and inventoried, we turned to
the multi-touch screen:

Below is a depiction of the stages
of dissection:

The
leftmost picture is the LCD and layer immediately behind it, followed
by the middle two layers and then the final piece of the screen
assembly.

Here's a closer look at the backside of the iPhone's outer screen
layer:

A
closer look at the middle layers of the iPhone screen setup:

The
final piece, the one closest to the motherboard, has a faint pattern of
dots laid out in a grid which you can sort of see in the picture below:

The
grid continues down the entire panel, once again necessary for the
multi-touch screen.





Page 5 The Aftermath

Taking apart the screen left us with this (don't worry, this isn't the
iPhone we're reviewing [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]...):

The
screen we're pulling away is a somewhat translucent surface, behind it
is the touch screen surface itself.
With the screen removed, here's all we're left with on the other side of
the iPhone: