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iFixit's Full iPhone 13 Pro Teardown Shows Merged Face ID Components and Highlights Display Replacement Issues

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iFixit has started one of its traditional full device teardowns on the new iPhone 13 Pro, giving us a complete look at all of the components that are inside.

ifixit-iphone-13-models-xray.jpg

Prior to taking a look inside the new iPhone, iFixit did X-rays to show off the L-shaped battery, the MagSafe magnet ring, and stabilizing magnets for image sensors and logic boards.

This year's iPhone 13 Pro has an upper sensor cable near the top that's easy to rip during repairs, with iFixit calling it "scary thin." Visually, the Taptic Engine inside the device that controls Haptic Touch appears to be smaller, but it's actually bulkier than the similar component in the iPhone 13 Pro, weighing in at 6.3 grams, up from 4.8.

Compared to the iPhone 12 Pro, the iPhone 13 Pro does away with the display-mounted speaker earpiece, a move that will make display replacements easier. iFixit suspects that Apple is using touch-integrated OLED panels that combine the touch and OLED layers of the display, cutting down on cost, thickness, and the number of cables to deal with.

ifixit-full-13-teardown.jpg

The iPhone 13's flood illuminator and dot projector have merged into one module, which is part of the reason why Apple was able to cut down the size of the notch on this year's iPhones, and the Face ID hardware is now independent of the display. The earpiece speaker that was removed from the display has been relocated between the front-facing camera and the Face ID module.

According to iFixit, despite the decoupling of the Face ID module and the display, any display replacement disables Face ID. This means that screen replacements not authorized by Apple will result in non-functional Face ID components.

As we found out last week, the iPhone 13 Pro is using an 11.97Wh battery, which equates to 3,095mAh, up from 2,815mAh in the iPhone 12 Pro. The battery in the iPhone 13 Pro has an L-shaped design this year, a departure from the rectangular battery used in last year's Pro model. iFixit says that battery swap tests have been successful, despite rumors that battery replacements wouldn't be possible.

There's 6GB SK Hynix LPDDR4X RAM inside, along with several Apple-designed power management and ultra-wide band chips, and as expected, the iPhone 13 Pro is equipped with Qualcomm's SDX60M modem and what iFixit believes is a Qualcomm DRR868 5G RF transceiver.

ifixit-iphone-13-pro-disassembled.jpg

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that the Qualcomm modem chip in this year's iPhones has satellite communication functionality, but if it's in there, iFixit didn't notice and as no satellite feature has been announced, it's a latent function if it exists. Bloomberg has clarified that Apple is working on a satellite feature that will let people send texts in emergency situations using a satellite connection, but this functionality isn't expected until 2022.

Moving on, the iPhone 13 Pro features Kioxia NAND Flash memory, a front-end module from Broadcom, an NXP Semiconductor NFC controller, and more.

iFixit's full teardown has more detail on all of the components that are inside the device, and iFixit ultimately gave the iPhone 13 Pro a repairability score of 5 out of 10 due to the Face ID display replacement issue, the double glass, and the waterproofing methods that make some repairs more difficult.

Article Link: iFixit's Full iPhone 13 Pro Teardown Shows Merged Face ID Components and Highlights Display Replacement Issues
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/27/ifixit-iphone-13-pro-teardown/
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After just replacing batteries in 3 older iPhones, The new (fragile) cable they highlight is really concerning frustrating to note. That and the lack of FaceID after a display replacement (why since the sensors stay on the phone?) is all a bit nonsensical to me. Makes it hard to keep these devices to their 4-6 year mark Apple is seeming to support.

Good other bits in this device though.
 
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Apple still using LPDDR4 RAM. There was an expectation that they'd move to LPDDR5 this year since the flag ship phones of their rivals started using it last year.
Remember thought that the "rival" phones also come with (need) twice as much RAM (12G compared to the 6G in the 12/13). That's Android for you....
 
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Seoras said:
Apple still using LPDDR4 RAM. There was an expectation that they'd move to LPDDR5 this year since the flag ship phones of their rivals started using it last year.
Remember thought that the "rival" phones also come with (need) twice as much RAM (12G compared to the 6G in the 12/13). That's Android for you....
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iPhone 13 *cough* 12S *cough* 😜
 
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The inability to replace the display by a third party is ridiculous. You can’t even salvage an OEM display from another iPhone. That’s environmentally friendly.

I guess the existing warning message wasn’t enough to raise AppleCare+ sales numbers.
 
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JPack said:
The inability to replace the display by a third party is ridiculous. You can’t even salvage an OEM display from another iPhone. That’s environmentally friendly.

I guess the existing warning message wasn’t enough to raise AppleCare+ sales numbers.
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Just stop buying dang iPhones then. Speak with your wallet, If something is inexcusable stop using the dang product.

All of a sudden Right to Repair becomes a lower priority when I tell people to just buy an Android.

I'm an iPhone user, accidents happen, yes, but I just get protection plans for my items, sure replacing items is an okay solution, but from what I've seen Dropping a phone and damaging the screen sometimes doesn't fix any underlying connection failures there are.

Also, Right to Repair should pass, then iPhone will not only be repairable but supported in software for longer than 6 months like android. (Sarcasm, more like a year and a half.)
 
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AbSoluTc said:
Why? Are you in need of 8GB of ram? Are you experiencing issues with 6? Would you even care if you didn't know how much it had?
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I have yet to have an issue with the phone that I thought could be fixed with just a couple extra gigs of ram. It’s not like a desktop where you can see a direct correlation between performance and the amount of data held in memory for a particular application. Video and photo transformation that do seem to take time would probably be better accelerated with more CPU/GPU cores rather than memory. The shared memory architecture also means you are probably getting a boost in performance over similar system that reserve vram exclusively, so direct comparisons become a little harder.
 
Khalmoon said:
Just stop buying dang iPhones then. Speak with your wallet, If something is inexcusable stop using the dang product.

All of a sudden Right to Repair becomes a lower priority when I tell people to just buy an Android.

I'm an iPhone user, accidents happen, yes, but I just get protection plans for my items, sure replacing items is an okay solution, but from what I've seen Dropping a phone and damaging the screen sometimes doesn't fix any underlying connection failures there are.

Also, Right to Repair should pass, then iPhone will not only be repairable but supported in software for longer than 6 months like android. (Sarcasm, more like a year and a half.)
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Please drop the all-or-nothing thinking. This is a public forum. Using one’s voice to raise issues they are concerned about is a perfectly valid response. If you’re that bothered, then take your own medicine and stop reading public comments if they bother you.

Edit: I see you’re new here. Hope you enjoy your stay.
 
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4jasontv said:
I notice Safari keeps forgetting what was loaded on a tab and having to refresh the page. I consider that a RAM issue. Would something else fix it?
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That’s a Safari issue. And more likely Apple not wanting to keep JavaScript process running in the background sucking CPU cycles and needlessly draining battery.
 
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Khalmoon said:
Just stop buying dang iPhones then. Speak with your wallet, If something is inexcusable stop using the dang product.
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Louder for the people in the back.

I've stopped buying new iPhones - I pick them up cheap and used on eBay. Apple doesn't do anywhere near enough to justify the price on their new phones (and if they did, the price wouldn't fall so much on the used market.)

I've considered not buying iPhones at all... but I guess from Apple's perspective, it's the same either way - they're not getting my money.
 
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4jasontv said:
I wonder why safari needs to run javascript to keep a PDF or JPG loaded.
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It doesn’t, but Apple’s aggressive housekeeping on background apps is deigned for maximizing battery life and it just kills things indiscriminately unless they are of certain application classes, like VOIP apps. Apple doesn’t keep tabs (pun intended) on what a page’s contents are, it just knows after set amount of time it will be necessary for the browser to reload the URL to display it again and it dumps it from cache. I have tabs that I don’t revisit for weeks or months sometimes. I’d hate for iOS to keep them in memory even if they were just images or PDFs (which can be rather large).
 
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visualseed said:
It doesn’t, but Apple’s aggressive housekeeping on background apps is deigned for maximizing battery life and it just kills things indiscriminately unless they are of certain application classes, like VOIP apps. Apple doesn’t keep tabs (pun intended) on what a page’s contents are, it just knows after set amount of time it will be necessary for the browser to reload the URL to display it again and it dumps it form cache. I have tabs that I don’t revisit for weeks or months sometimes. I’d hate for iOS to keep them in memory even if they were just images or PDFs (which can be rather large).
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That explanation reads to me as it dumps the content because it doesn't have enough memory.
 
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