iFixit's iPhone 5s Teardown Reveals Touch ID Fingerprint Sensor, 'Invisible' M7 Chip

[TroyBoy30]

You know what they say.. "There's a sucker born every min ..." Oh wait I'm replying to one

whatever you say

 

[timekepper]

Arrogant is right

O

But iFixit is really obsessed with its hobbyist's view. You can't replace the battery? They'll swap one out if you come up with a dud that fails earlier than the mean. It's not made to open up, period! Too many seams on Jony's case. If you want the fourteen pound phone with a car battery and a dynamo, that's somewhere else. I mean, it might be arrogant, whatever; but they don't, and NEVER HAVE, made a hobbyists' PC with all-removable and customizable thoughts. That's was a large market in the PC industry. More and more Android devices are closing up too. I think if you have an early, failed battery, and there's no sign of tampering or voiding of warranties, they'll give you a new one. If batteries of a certain batch start failing at 6 months, they want to know about it.

I agree, you are arrogant and maybe something else. Is there anyone out there that can remember "Heath Kit", you buy the parts and build your own Ham Radio. It's gone and now you have to buy one all ready built, this makes for good radio but the user lost the the skill of building one so can't repair it. Bravo for this site and what they do. I still build my PC and repair it, along with my radios.

 

[wkadamsjr]

Also of note was the striking lack of a discrete M7 co-processor. Perhaps the "M" stands for "magical," because it's not there, folks. The mythical M7 is most likely a combination of motion-oriented components, and not an actual dedicated chip (as Apple implied during last week's product announcement). Chock it up to savvy marketing.

While I know this is not MacRumors' verbiage, the phrase is "chalk it up," not "chock it up."

 

[kdarling]

While I know this is not MacRumors' verbiage, the phrase is "chalk it up," not "chock it up."

Thanks, but its a mute point.

They're is defiantly a lot of bad grammer and mispellings these days. Witch is a fact your going to have to except, or loose your mind, weather you like it or not.

I shutter to think about what a dumber web sight would have wrote in it's forum treads.

 

[Diatribe]

Well that Touch ID sensor better work for more than 2 years... but I am sure that Apple has figured that out. They wouldn't have implemented it if it didn't work for at least 4 years.

 

[everything-i]

IMO, the M7 almost seems like its in the 5s as a data gathering/dummy run to optimise the chip for iWatch.

For that to happen I'd imagine it'd be a separate chip. So I was quite surprised to see its part of the SoC.

I think the space constraints within the case mandate it be at least bonded into the same package as the A7 and integrating into the SOC is a huge cost reduction over producing two individual chips.

 

[notjustjay]

Well that Touch ID sensor better work for more than 2 years... but I am sure that Apple has figured that out. They wouldn't have implemented it if it didn't work for at least 4 years.

Why would it stop working?

 

[Wondercow]

Thanks, but its a mute point.

They're is defiantly a lot of bad grammer and mispellings these days. Witch is a fact your going to have to except, or loose your mind, weather you like it or not.

I shutter to think about what a dumber web sight would have wrote in it's forum treads.

Were did you learn you're spelling and grammer?????????? Do'nt u mean "alot" (or "allot")

(The latter actually really bugs me since it's, you know, an actual word with a meaning which bears no resemblance to that of "a lot".)

 

[tymaster50]

$700 down the drain lol

 

[PBUser167]

I just assumed that the M7 was built into the A7.

I suspect that as well. The M7 Graphic Apple uses doesn't have chip markings on it like the A series chips...

 

[ThisIsNotMe]

I'm wondering if the finger print sensor wasn't a quick last minute "Oh ****" moment add-on because the 5s isn't much more than a mildly improved 5. The reason I wonder about this is that looking at the iFixit tear down, it really looks like someone just slapped on the fingerprint sensor without a lot of engineering design forethought. That is soooo not the Apple way - at least not over the past decade or so.

1) Apple dropped $400 million on AuthenTec more than a year ago. Hardly last minute and you don't spend $400 million on something you think is a gimmick.

2)Mildly improved 5????

Yeah.....

 

[katewes]

If you do it yourself instead of heading over to a local Genius Bar to pay a "professional" to fix it (or just swap the device), you're obviously too technically savvy and poor. Not the sort of customer Apple is looking for.

Not all tech-savvy people are poor.

Frugality is a habit, maybe not of all the middle-class, but of many of history's super-rich.

Compared to many, I'm not short of a quid, but I upgrade my RAM, hard drives and SSD's on Macs and iPhones.

I use Macs for stability and ease of use - and am appalled at the bourgeois attitude towards people who genuinely want to save some money by doing something that is technically feasible, e.g. changing an iPhone battery.

Why did Apple have to glue the battery? It's not as if the battery is jiggling inside the phone. The only reason is to make life harder for people who want to change the battery themselves. Same goes for the Retina MacBook Pro.

The fact is, when you see Wall Street, I guess it's a fact of life that people exist who disdain the humble attempts of others to save some money.

Let me say this, SeaFox, when you take your attitude, and multiply your attitude by half the population of the U.S. - it gives foreigners some perspective of why the U.S. is submerged in debt.

 

[iSayuSay]

Not all tech-savvy people are poor.

Frugality is a habit, maybe not of all the middle-class, but of many of history's super-rich.

Compared to many, I'm not short of a quid, but I upgrade my RAM, hard drives and SSD's on Macs and iPhones.

I use Macs for stability and ease of use - and am appalled at the bourgeois attitude towards people who genuinely want to save some money by doing something that is technically feasible, e.g. changing an iPhone battery.

Why did Apple have to glue the battery? It's not as if the battery is jiggling inside the phone. The only reason is to make life harder for people who want to change the battery themselves. Same goes for the Retina MacBook Pro.

The fact is, when you see Wall Street, I guess it's a fact of life that people exist who disdain the humble attempts of others to save some money.

Let me say this, SeaFox, when you take your attitude, and multiply your attitude by half the population of the U.S. - it gives foreigners some perspective of why the U.S. is submerged in debt.

As they said... there's a sucker born every minute

I feel proud for being able to fix OoW computer products by myself. No need for paying astronomical price when you can do it yourself, and because it's OoW I have nothing to lose.

 

[D.T.]

Also, such low power parts could easily make their way into a smartwatch, where wrist motions and gestures can be important input.

Actually, MSP430 is a 16-bit MCU and one of the lowest power on the market. Apple use these occasionally for housekeeping on Mac logic boards. The Atmel can well be based on their 16-bit XMEGA low power core. If Apple were to design their own, they would likely reach for something like ARM Cortex-M0/3/4, but they may as well let some MCU vendor spin a customized version of their MCU or outright use an of-the-shelf one like the others.

You could argue other manufacturers go for discrete coprocessor because they don't design their own SoC and that Apple can integrate it straight into A7 and save space. I don't think that is the reason - there are technical as well as practical reasons to go separate.

Yeah, Apple does that pretty often, sourcing things like audio / power / touch etc chips from other companies, with custom Apple markings. I agree, but we'll hopefully find out if/when Chipworks does an internal study of the 5S chips.

Great posts (slightly abbreviated above).

 

[nostaws]

the 5s isn't much more than a mildly improved 5.

I disagree but only because of the 64bit chip/OS. Unfortunately for Apple 64 bit chip isn't as sexy for consumers as a flash light. But the processing power opens up a myriad of possibilities.

 

[ascanu]

A7 dual core, still beats every competitor's quad core (Browsermark 2.0):

http://gigaom.com/2013/09/19/tests-...re-still-beats-quad-core-android-competitors/

 

[Glassman]

Just noticed the iPhone 5c teardown - the layout is virtually identical to 5s as are most of the components. I can only see 3 differences in chips and that's the obvious A6 vs. A7, their respective power management chips and lastly the audio codec/amp chip which grew considerably larger in 5s. Apart from these one can match everything else in just about the same locations between 5c & 5s. That does not leave much room for M7 to hide - unless it's folded into the new audio chip (unlikely as it's designed by 3rd party) or unless it's silently present in 5c as well without being active, it's looking like it may be part of the A7 indeed. There's a bit of foam surrounding connectors that has not been peeled off with a nice real estate for additional chip(s), where iPhone 5 actually had a couple smaller chips nearby which are missing from view here in 5c/5s, but I suspect whatever is underneath will be common to both models anyway.

iPhone 5c:
http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/lnGGYTImje2ZjLkW.huge

iPhone 5s:
http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/kPd1SGHTq12IUsRv.huge

 

[cube]

When I watched the keynote, I suspected the M7 might not actually be a separate package, but part of the A7 chip.

 

[chrmjenkins]

Just noticed the iPhone 5c teardown - the layout is virtually identical to 5s as are most of the components. I can only see 3 differences in chips and that's the obvious A6 vs. A7, their respective power management chips and lastly the audio codec/amp chip which grew considerably larger in 5s. Apart from these one can match everything else in just about the same locations between 5c & 5s. That does not leave much room for M7 to hide - unless it's folded into the new audio chip (unlikely as it's designed by 3rd party) or unless it's silently present in 5c as well without being active, it's looking like it may be part of the A7 indeed. There's a bit of foam surrounding connectors that has not been peeled off with a nice real estate for additional chip(s), where iPhone 5 actually had a couple smaller chips nearby which are missing from view here in 5c/5s, but I suspect whatever is underneath will be common to both models anyway.

iPhone 5c:
http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/lnGGYTImje2ZjLkW.huge

iPhone 5s:
http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/kPd1SGHTq12IUsRv.huge

I am not convinced that that is the codec. They could have changed package types from the iPhone 5. There are 3 apple branded chips that aren't the SoC that we are looking for -- the codec, the amps and the PMIC. The iFixIt teardown only identified two such chips. Perhaps it is possible that they integrated the amps and codec into one package?

Your second photo shows what I'm talking about. The teal outlined package is the PMIC I suspect. That means the larger metal package has to be the amps, codec or both.

 

[sirdir]

Hmm, I changed the iPhone 5 display yesterday. If thats 7 of 10, I wouldn't want to repair a 3 of 10 or something… I made the same with an iPhone 4 and I found it much easier, even if it was a lot more work.
For example the home button 'contacts' are glued to the device in a way I couldn't even believe that they can be removed...

 

[mdelvecchio]

Why did Apple have to glue the battery? It's not as if the battery is jiggling inside the phone. The only reason is to make life harder for people who want to change the battery themselves. Same goes for the Retina MacBook Pro.

are you an electrical engineer? nope. so you really don't have any idea why electronics companies glue components to their chassis...do some research. go talk to some hardware guys are your local university.

it's not a silly conspiracy.

 

[chrmjenkins]

are you an electrical engineer? nope. so you really don't have any idea why electronics companies glue components to their chassis...do some research. go talk to some hardware guys are your local university.

it's not a silly conspiracy.

The mechanical engineer would be the one to decide if the battery is glued or not.

source: I'm an EE.

edit: Chipworks found the M7:

https://twitter.com/Chipworks/status/381101965767213057

 

[Diatribe]

Why would it stop working?

http://weblog.invasivecode.com/post/57447455012/will-a-fingerprint-sensor-be-apples-next-hit

If you search for the specifications of a CMOS fingerprint device, you will find a number representing the lifetime of a device. That number is expressed in number of touches (before it completely dies). That number is provided in ideal conditions of usage and in a normal operating environment of temperature and humidity. But remember where you normally use your iPhone. You keep it in your “dirty” pockets, you leave it on different surfaces, and in humid and hot or cold and dry environments. Sometimes water drops on it or you forget it in your car under the sun. All these factors stress the working conditions of the sensor surface and contribute to speeding up its decay process.

Unfortunately there is no existing solution to this. Manufacturers can only try to make the fingerprint sensor last longer, but sooner or later that device will stop working properly. This is also why Apple cannot provide a fingerprint sensor for payments. And if they do, they are making a huge mistake, because the surface destruction process explained above introduces the most dangerous problem in fingerprint recognition: false acceptance, when after a while somebody else can be granted access to your device.

Companies like Motorola, Fujitsu, Siemens, and Samsung have tried to integrate fingerprint readers in their laptops and handheld devices, but they have all failed because of the poor durability of the sensing surface.

For you, this means that a fingerprint sensor on your phone will break after a while. How long after you buy it? Well, that will depend on where you live, how you use it, where you use it, how careful you are with it, and how clean your hands are.

 

[macs4nw]

But iFixit is really obsessed with its hobbyist's view. You can't replace the battery? They'll swap one out if you come up with a dud that fails earlier than the mean. It's not made to open up, period! Too many seams on Jony's case. If you want the fourteen pound phone with a car battery and a dynamo, that's somewhere else. I mean, it might be arrogant, whatever; but they don't, and NEVER HAVE, made a hobbyists' PC with all-removable and customizable thoughts. That's was a large market in the PC industry. More and more Android devices are closing up too. I think if you have an early, failed battery, and there's no sign of tampering or voiding of warranties, they'll give you a new one. If batteries of a certain batch start failing at 6 months, they want to know about it.

I agree, you are arrogant and maybe something else. Is there anyone out there that can remember "Heath Kit", you buy the parts and build your own Ham Radio. It's gone and now you have to buy one all ready built, this makes for good radio but the user lost the the skill of building one so can't repair it. Bravo for this site and what they do. I still build my PC and repair it, along with my radios.

You're not going to get any respect for your opinions, if you insult your fellow forum members' legitimate viewpoints. If you can disagree with Swift without rudeness, your posts will be taken more seriously.

 

[marcinsf]

the article just said the 5s scored lower than the 5, so no they are not getting easier to repair.

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it's not tim cooks job to be innovative, regardless of his predecessor .

True, but it IS his job to encourage, cultivate and even seed creativity as well as manage the company's priorities and personnel to effect the end product production. As I noted, Steve's creativity replacement has yet to be crowned in either a single person or multiple people. I do think it is a chasm that is daunting at best. Will it take nearly 10 years as it did in 1985 to 1996 when Steve returned to rescue Apple?

The recent lull in the post Steve Jobs era of innovative products may be only a random phenomena or it may be a symptom of a corporate cancer allowed to permeate the Apple Corps (pun intended on the word corp). A few of my Apple employed Bay Area friends have jumped ship recently. They may be just making their next career move or has the Apple koolaid gotten bitter and less nourishing. As they say in French, "On verra" and we often say "We'll see"

One thing I have admired over that past 10+ years has been that Apple was able to take current concepts and innovate and elaborate on them to give us our dreams that actually worked in real life. The iPhone 5, 5s and 5c aren't really dreamy - they are nice improvements but innovative they are not. As I said in a previous post, it's an awful lot like the automobile manufacturers slick marketing and quick change imagery to just put out the same old thing in a different package or color - Yawn