iPhone 5 Teardown

In the review they say <i>Antennas are sized to be fractions of full wavelengths</i>. I thought I read a year ago that the reason the 4 and 4s didn't have LTE was because the physical size of the phone wasn't large enough for the radio antenna needed for LTE. Is it true that they needed to extend the size of the phone to get the right fractional size for an LTE antenna?

Looks like the teardown is underway, so only a few pictures are posted. Would be fun to get a live feed of them hacking on it!

I love this site. My MBA fan had an issue and I only stumbled across it while researching my repair options.<p>I was able to buy a new fan and all the tools at less than half the cost of getting an Apple repair center to do it. I'll certainly be able to reuse the tools as I build up my "repair shop".<p>They have very detailed video guides that explain every step of the process--and they have them tailored for every MBA generation, explaining the little differences between them as they go. Very cool. I especially like their retro philosophy of DIY and repair vs. recycle and discard.

Wow, did they actually go to Asia to buy the iPhone5 so that they'd be the first ones to post the teardown? (it seems that there are a few sites that compete in this teardown/BOM space)

It's ironic that, after all this engineering, it's reduced to court cases about rounded corners sigh

I'm interested to see if they discover a firmware disabled NFC chip, similar to how Bluetooth was originally included but disabled. And yes, I'm aware it was publicly denied.

You know, seeing how many chips are in there makes me realize how much more the electronics have the potential to shrink as these things continue to integrate. Even in the same sized case, it might be possible to slip in quote a bit more battery.

They've been on step 8 for about 45 minutes. I'm looking forward to hearing what obstacles they ran into that slowed them down a bit.

Didn't realize the iPhone 4/4S did away with the simple screen replacement. I was really impressed with that when I broke my iPhone 3G display and came to replace it.<p>I was kind of thinking they'd sacrifice that with the new, even thinner iPhone 5, though. It's a pleasant surprise to see the screen assembly is effectively user-removable.<p>I just wish Apple supplied replacement screen assemblies. With the new integrated touch screen it's only going to become more difficult for third parties to manufacture passable replacement parts...

Can someone explain why both this and the iPad need two different touchscreen controllers?

What stops them from doing the full teardown at once? Why only the first few steps?