On Friday, iFixit started its live teardown of Apple’s iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro series smartphones. Less than a day later, part one of the teardown experts’ detailed report of the iPhone 13 Pro’s internals is live on their website.
In their preliminary X-rays of the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max, iFixit found a double dose of L-shaped batteries, making the most out of the available internal space. Last year’s ‘Pro’ iPhones and this year’s base iPhone 13 series, in comparison, all sport regular ol’ rectangular batteries.
The iPhone 13 Pro comes apart similarly to the iPhone 12 Pro — display first. Immediately upon opening up the device, iFixit noticed that the digitizer and display cables have become one, the new Taptic Engine is smaller (but heavier) than the 12 Pro’s, and the earpiece speaker which used to be affixed to the back of the display now rests inside the chassis. The earpiece speaker’s new placement should make screen replacements easier.
The dreaded notch, which is unfortunately still present on the most expensive iPhone to date (the 1 TB iPhone 13 Pro Max at $2,229 CAD), is 20% smaller this year, at least horizontally, due to the flood illuminator and dot projector for Face ID merging into one. The vertical size for the notch remains the same as last year’s.
The iFixit team also got a good look at this year’s ‘Pro’ camera system, complete with a 12MP Wide-angle lens, 12 MP Ultra Wide-angle lens, a Telephoto lens, and LiDAR capability. The teardown specialists noted that this year’s camera lenses feature significantly larger sensors, and the camera module is therefore considerably bulkier.
Last on the agenda for part one was the L-shaped battery, which caps out at 11.97 Wh. The battery is pretty easy to remove thanks to the stretch-release adhesive used, and while there were fears of Apple making battery swaps impossible on this year’s iPhones, all of iFixit‘s battery swap tests proved successful.
Stay tuned for part two of the teardown, which will take a closer look at the full-fledged version of Apple’s new A15 Bionic SoC, provide more information on part-swapping, delve deeper into this year’s notch hardware, and more. Once iFixit concludes its teardown of this year’s flagship iPhone, we should also have a ‘Repairability Score’ for it.
For a detailed overview of how the ‘Pro’ iPhone has improved generation-over-generation, check out our comparison between the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro.
