iPhone 5s Teardown and More

Web Version  |  Update preferences  |  Unsubscribe We've been busier than a mongoose at a desert cobra convention—making repair guides, tearing down the latest tech, and determining how repairable your smartphones are. In case you missed all the hullabaloo, here's what we've been up to lately: iPhone 5s Teardown We sent our teardown engineers across the globe to get the new iPhone 5s before the U.S. release date. We wanted to know: Is the iPhone 5s just an iPhone 5 in a shiny, gold case? So, we got up close and personal with Apple's new Touch ID sensor, the glued-down battery, and the updated iSight camera. iPhone 5c Teardown Please, avert your eyes if you are color sensitive. Apple's brand new iPhone 5c made headlines for three reasons: it's cheap(er than a 5s), it's plastic, and it's technicolor. But we're never satisfied with how things look on the outside. Nope, it's what's on the inside that counts. So, we unleashed our iOpeners to find out what makes the iPhone 5c tick. Smartphone Repairability List We've added both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c to our brand new Smartphone Repairability List. People always ask us where their cellphones stack up in terms of repairability. So, we've aggregated our repairability scores for the best-selling smartphones into one convenient page. Is your phone easy to fix? A7 Processor Teardown The 64-bit A7 processor in the iPhone 5s puts out twice the performance of its predecessor. With the help of a fancy electron microscope, our friends at Chipworks determined who makes the A7 and how it fits so much power into such a small package. We also snuck a much closer peek at the M7 coprocessor, the iSight camera, and the LTE Modem. Two New iMac Teardowns Apple stealth-released two new iMacs on Tuesday. Not to be outdone, we performed our own stealth teardowns of the brand new iMac 21.5'' and the iMac 27''. And we found a couple of big changes—especially in the 21.5'' iMac. Unlike last year's model, you can now add a second hard drive via the Fusion Drive SSD port, even if you don't pick the iMac with the Fusion Drive right out of the factory. Unfortunately, we also found a new, woefully non-upgradeable CPU. Edit your subscription | Unsubscribe