When Apple’s iPhone 5 design first went public, it looked like that the device was going to be terrifying to repair — just like its new Retina MacBook Pro. With the rear panel and the sides of the device combined into one piece, it appeared the iPhone 5 would be extremely hard to get into. But according to iFixit’s new iPhone 5 teardown, this could be the “most repairable iPhone” yet.
Display Screen Can Easily Be Replaced
The best thing about the iPhone 5 is that the display — perhaps the most fragile component — comes off first. This means that display replacement is merely going to be a ten-minute task. Changing iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S displays was definitely a more difficult and tedious task as with those devices you had to take out almost every single component to remove the display from the body of the device. With the iPhone 5, however, that’s not the case — it’s held in by two pentalobe screws, and that is all
Other fascinating results that the iFixit teardown has discovered is that the device comes with a much tougher home button. It is essentially attached to the back of the display with a metal bracket, so it shouldn’t be as prone to damage like those in previous iPhones and iPod touches have been.
The iPhone 5 employs 1GB of RAM from Elpida, not from Samsung like previous iPhones, and a Qualcomm MDM9615M 4G processor. Remarkably, the device uses the same track pad controller used in the MacBook Air — alongside a Texas Instruments touchscreen controller — to process input through the Retina display.
Another curious find is related to the vibration motor. In the iPhone 4S, Apple swapped a rotational motor with a counterweight to a linear-oscillating vibrator. This slienced vibrations to some extent, but also just as powerful. With the iPhone 5, Apple has reverted to a rotational motor, and iFixit says they are “scratching their heads as to why.”