Apple's iPhone X has been officially released and iFixit has taken the new device apart to unveil its internal components, including the dual camera module and and TrueDepth camera system.
In short, the iPhone X has the following main components inside that glass sandwich:
- A11 "Bionic" chip with neural engine and embedded M11 motion coprocessor
- 5.8 inch "all-screen" OLED multitouch Super Retina HD display with 2436 ? 1125-pixel resolution (458 ppi)
- Dual 12 MP cameras (wide-angle and telephoto) with ?/1.8 and ?/2.4 apertures and OIS
- 7 MP TrueDepth camera with ?/2.2 aperture, 1080p HD video recording, and Face ID
- Support for fast-charge and Qi wireless charging
- 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi‑Fi w/MIMO + Bluetooth 5.0 + NFC
The device has an incredibly space efficient miniaturized logic board, according to iFixit. Comparing the footprint of the two boards, the iPhone X motherboard is about 70% of the size of the iPhone 8 Plus board-that's a lot more floor space for battery.
Speaking of batteries, the iPhone X is equipped with two battery cells, which is a first in an iPhone. This phone is packing a 10.35 Wh (2716 mAh at 3.81 V) battery, just beating out the 10.28 Wh 8 Plus battery, but a drop in the bucket compared to the Galaxy Note8 with its 12.71 Wh behemoth.
One of the most exciting features of the iPhone X is the TrueDepth camera system, which is responsible for the Face ID feature.
Apple bought Israeli PrimeSense for $360 million way back in 2013, and has surely invested hundreds of millions more since then bringing this to market. PrimeSense had developed the infrared dot matrix tech powering Microsoft's Kinect.
So at the top of the iPhone X there a mini Kinect TrueDepth camera system. This system rallies a team of sensors to bring facial recognition to the X. Step one in this system: the flood illuminator embedded in the display blasts your face with infrared (IR) light. Next, the front-facing camera, marked in red, confirms the presence of a face.
The specific iPhone X device that iFixit used for the teardown used three Qualcomm chips: the WTR5975 gigabit LTE transceiver and the MDM9655 Snapdragon X16 LTE modem and PMD9655 PMIC. it also included a Broadcom BCM15951 touch controller, an NXP 80V18 PN80V NFC controller module and Toshiba 64 GB flash memory, among other chips.
iFixit concluded that the display and battery repairs remain a priority in the iPhone's design. A cracked display can be replaced without removing the biometric Face ID hardware. But fussy cables tie unrelated components together into complex assemblies-expensive and troublesome to replace. In addition, the glass on front and back doubles the likelihood of drop damage-and if the back glass breaks, you'll be removing every component and replacing the entire chassis.