What's Inside the iPhone 7? iFixit's Teardown Has the Answers

It can be said that one of the iPhone 7’s features is the absence of a longstanding one: the headphone jack. Indeed, the new iPhone has done away with the audio socket in favor of wireless alternatives such as Apple’s very own AirPods.

Now if you’re wondering what has taken the place of the headphone jack inside the iPhone 7, wonder no more. It’s now mostly occupied by the Taptic Engine, which powers the handset’s pressure-sensitive and haptic feedback-enabled home button, which in turn happens to be removable and subsequently replaceable.

Another marquee feature of the iPhone 7 is water resistance. And iFixit’s teardown reveals the lengths to which Apple has gone to make the device waterproof.

The tightness of the new home button relative to the regular button on previous iPhones is one. Other factors that suggest waterproofing include stronger strip sealing, ingress protection on the speaker grilles, a camera bump that is conjoined with the chassis, and rubber gaskets instead of foam adhesives on such external components as the Lightning port, the SIM tray, and the mute switch.

The iPhone 7 Plus has turned out to be the more popular choice among early buyers of Apple’s latest iPhone, and more than likely, it has to do with the fact that, unlike the smaller iPhone 7, the iPhone 7 Plus has dual cameras.

“Apple’s got us seeing double as we pull out the camera array with two separate sensors, two lenses, and two little connectors,” the iFixit team notes. “The two 12 MP cameras — one wide-angle with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), just like in the iPhone 7, the second a telephoto — allow for optical zoom.”

The teardown performed by iFixit also highlights the new earpiece speaker that also functions as a loudspeaker to enable the iPhone 7 to produce stereo sound.

Of course, an iFixit iPhone teardown wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the two main occupants of an iPhone’s internal system: the logic board and the battery.

Well, this latest teardown confirms that the iPhone 7 uses the Apple A10 Fusion system-on-a-chip and that the iPhone 7 Plus, in particular, has 3GB of RAM, the most of any iPhone. As for the battery, the iPhone 7 Plus’ has a total charge of 2,900 mAh, slightly higher than the 2,750 mAh of that of the iPhone 6s Plus.

This iPhone 7 teardown by iFixit is interesting, to say the least. In addition to confirming what we’ve already known from Apple’s own pronouncements, it reveals the results of the company’s efforts in making possible the iPhone 7’s key differentiators from its predecessors, including the removal of the headphone jack, the integration of a “taptic” home button, and water resistance.

Be sure to head over to iFixit for the nitty-gritty of the iPhone 7 teardown.