just last Tuesday Apple announced its
new line of iPhones and the big surprise
was the low cost unapologetically
plastic iPhone 5c I say surprise but if
you've looked at any Apple blogs you've
seen post about this since June of this
year
well since the announcement we've been
wondering if the iPhone 5c is just an
iPhone 5 with a new case or if there's
more than meets the eye there's only one
way we know to find out and that's to
tear it down
hi I'm Gwendolyn with iFixit and today
we're tearing down the colorful new
iPhone 5c the iPhone 5c takes the place
of the five in the iPhone product line
which now includes the 4s the 5c and the
5s it comes in your choice of five
different colors and spec wise the
iPhone 5c is very similar to the five it
features a 4-inch display with a
resolution of 11 36 by 640 and a pixel
density of 326 pixels per inch not
surprisingly the iPhone 5c is very close
in size to the five I'll be it a little
bigger measuring in at 124 point four
millimeters in height fifty nine point
two millimeters in width and eight point
nine seven millimeters in depth and
weighs in slightly heavier than the five
at 132 grams as we go to open the phone
we're greeted again by pentalobe screws
and look they have slightly different
heads we're sure it's to accommodate
that trendy new case and just like that
we're in our very first look inside the
phone is deja vu all over again
as expected it looks very similar to the
iPhone 5 inside since we've seen it all
before we move on to the battery after a
little help from our iOpener we're able
to release the battery and find that
it's a nice upgrade from the 5 the 5c
has been bumped up to a 1510 milliamp
hour battery which will give you up to 8
hours on 3G and 10 hours on LTE and
Wi-Fi as we turn our attention to the
logic board we see something we were not
expecting and we're not too happy about
it yes ladies and gentlemen more glue we
turn our spudger on to some adhered
connectors and finally the logic board
is free now we have the opportunity to
inspect the chips
the iPhone 5c behind some shielding we
discovered the same a6 chip the a6 was
the first custom-designed processor for
the iPhone by Apple and it looks like
they liked it enough to keep it around
for a bit all in all the internals of
the iPhone 5c match the 5 pretty closely
with the exception of the new LTE chip
the chip allows for multi spectrum
multimode LTE support with our teardown
complete it's time to talk repairability
and iFixit our mission is to teach
people how to repair everything so we
give every gadget we tear down a repair
ability score between 1 and 10 10 being
the easiest to repair and one being the
most difficult the iPhone 5c scores a 6
out of 10 curve variability and here's
why on the plus side and just like the
iPhone 5 you only need a few tools to
replace the front panel assembly and the
battery is still fairly easy to access
even though it's not technically user
replaceable
on the downside Apple is still using
those pesky proprietary screws so you'll
need a special pentalobe driver to
remove them in addition the Lightning
connector has lots of small components
soldered onto it making replacing just
one part pin possible but the final
downside and the reason for scoring a 6
is the battery there's no pool tab this
time and there's a considerable amount
of adhesive for the complete teardown
including tons of beautiful high-quality
images head on over to ifixit.com
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you