chat but we're like
very untimely i don't feel late i don't
feel late
i feel i feel very on time i am very on
time today
are we live i think we're live we're
live hey everyone i'm kk
i'm kyle and today we are going to take
apart the iphone 12
pro max so we already took apart the
iphone 12 the iphone 12 pro
and all of my engineers are taking apart
the iphone 12 mini in the other room so
you're stuck with me and our ceo kyle
hello uh and uh we haven't really
decided who's going to be taking this
phone apart we just got the 12 pro max
we're excited to see inside
our third iphone of the last two weeks
oh yeah so i guess uh we said we'd rock
paper scissors
i'm pretty rusty at taking apart iphones
but let's do it okay you ready
all right here we go wait so which one
so i got right
so i won so let's keep going so
okay so you won i won so i don't have to
part
okay i am going to take apart this phone
and i'm just going to mentally prepare
for that for a second
this is this is how we you know if you
if
uh we were both ready
yeah but i think i think this is a good
moment for you
uh so you guys have been wanting me to
take apart the phone for a while anyways
so i think it's time
um what's the last time what's the first
time you took something apart
so the first time i ever did a live
teardown was with kyle and before i
started working at ifixit i never had
any technical experience before
and he made me do my first teardown live
on the verge cast
stage at ces first teardown ever and
um before i fix it i'd never taken a
phone apart and i've probably only done
a couple dozen battery swaps on actually
nothing past an iphone 8
so this will be new for me we hire a lot
of people with repair experience
kk just wasn't i just wasn't one of them
so
bear with me but also if i can learn how
to do this and do it live
in front of lots of people then you can
too so i need to get started
this is kind of fun because you've got
uh you know a non-technical background
i'm a software person but
we're going to figure this out one way
or another so i did cheat a little bit
we did cheat a little bit
we had seen that the phone display is
really hard to get off so we took the
heat gun and i didn't
want either of us to suffer through lots
of
we didn't want to make all you have to
wait through the process so the new
glass
on on the the all the new 12s is the
ceramic glass apple says it's the most
drop resistant
uh iphone ever but the real thing and if
can you show off before you before you
do that show off how flush it is
i was just getting really close maybe
you got that other one next to it yeah
so we also picked up the mini
so you can look at those uh so the key
thing if you hold it straight on is you
don't the glass doesn't protrude beyond
the aluminum bezel and so if you think
about it dropping
most impacts on glass are on the edges
of the glass where it's most fragile
if you hit the face of glass of the
glass it's uh it's going to be a lot
more
able to withstand that impact so it's
relatively rare that you have a phone
that
cracks from an impact straight on the
glass usually it's from dropping your
phone and hitting the edge
so what apple has done to improve the
durability of this phone is recess
the glass flush so the aluminum is
completely flush with the glass if you
drop it on from any angle
it's going to hit the aluminum before it
hits the glass that's a that's a
wonderful network and it's definitely an
improvement over
uh the galaxy so i've got i've got here
this is a s20
and this has the glass wrap all the way
around the edge so the glass
is the thing that's going to get hit and
we see this with samsung phones that
when
these oleds are fragile you hit the
glass and they're toast kyle how many
screens have you broken i'm really antsy
to get started now because now i know
i'm doing this so i'm
just gonna dive right in uh yeah go for
it uh yeah i
um a few uh the last one this is great i
was i was mountain biking i had my my
phone on the handlebar
and i fell off a bridge and i went
upside down and
my phone actually broke my fall
it is the most damage i have ever like
it wasn't like the glass was just
shattered the
the screen was toast um but it was a
that was a motorola phone and uh i was
able to throw a new screen on it
only cryolene starts a story with i fell
off my mountain bike and it was great
we have we have a lot of wonderful
mountain biking trails here on the
central coast of california
all right and so i am pulling off my
first shield so i can get to
disconnecting the battery uh safety
first
mr noob ask us your question we are
we're watching the chat we want to hear
from you and i
i have disassembled here in front of me
i've got a iphone 12 pro and the 12
so we can take a look at uh at these
parts as she
starts to pull apart the 12 pro max this
is i mean it used to be we would get a
new iphone that would be an iphone and
we would take it apart and that would be
it and now there are so many different
models um that really
the conversation here is about what is
different in the 12 pro max
from uh from the 12 pro and the 12.
so i am disconnecting connectors and
trying not to be
in the top down shot which is a fun way
to do repair when you are distant from
taylor always talks about this when he
does hands on live tear downs because
it's really hard not to get your head in
it all right battery is disconnected and
i'm going to go for this
it's important to disconnect the battery
first so as we're using metal tools
inside the device it's very easy to
accidentally short something out
common mistake that people make in
repairs so the first thing we always say
is disconnect the battery
and then keep it disconnected that's
easy with the iphone with the if
pads we have a common problem where the
battery you disconnect it but it can
very easily
the cable flops back down reconnects
re-energizes the device
and causes many many ipad repair
failures
so it's essential to disconnect the
battery keep power off
okay we have a question how old is i fix
it
uh wyatt we we started in 2003 so i
guess that makes us close to 17 years
old now oh i was gonna say 16.
yeah uh we um well i we started in
in the dorms at cal poly just down the
road from us here and
our first ever repair manual that we
wrote was for the power book g3 pismo
which i still think is one of the best
laptops that apple has ever made so if
you really like connectors and if you've
watched this channel i hate them i break
them often
uh this board is just chock full of
connectors so i'm going to be as
delicate i can as i can
with the spudger and uh gently remove
them so i can get this display off and
get moving and so as you see inside the
12 pro max the battery looks very
different than on the others this is the
12 battery i think the 12 and the 12 pro
batteries are interchangeable
uh this battery so this is a 2800
milliamp hour battery what's the battery
uh capacity on that one
okay okay oh i don't know um do we know
that yet oh it says 360
3687 milliamp hours yeah so that's
another
uh 800 milliamp hours bigger and and
that bigger
battery size comes from the l-shape on
the left so they filled up the extra
space inside the phone
with that l-shaped battery we first saw
the l-shaped battery in the iphone 10
it's a really really cool manufacturing
process i i got to go through
a lithium battery factory in china
uh and it's fun to see the process it's
almost kind of like a paper mill
or like with the way that they make
newspapers because you have this film
and what this battery is is it's a whole
lot of layers
of film with the and the cathode
uh uh coated on it and then it's folded
back and forth and then you've got the
tabs along the edge that to pull the
power out
oh and i also wanted to mention that i
recently got a cat
so one of the other reasons i don't do
hands-on tear-downs as you can see
uh i have scratches all over which is
pretty cute so uh
i was hoping that our video team would
flash my cat on the screen because i
love him
his name is taiko why kitty uh might be
a tyka ytt fan if you are
haven't watched the mandalorian yet this
morning and your kitty is very cute
it's a very cute cat very cute kitty
thank you but seems to be rather
he is my nickname for him is tycho why
killer
because i i kind of think he wants to
kill me does he scratch anyone else
no that's it's just me i got really
excited about that
and you put up with it i do yeah yeah he
was the most effective thing
to stop doom scrolling so if you are
able to get a cat
then maybe do that all right
pandemic mental health management
absolutely
okay so we got the display off anything
different as you pull the display off
from the other devices
so i mean the first thing that i noticed
is the taptic engine is a different size
um i'm going to get it out so you can do
some comparisons here's the tactic
engine from the 12 and it's quite a bit
smaller
and in previous generations everything
was on the right but now we have the
logic board here
on the left the let's go back to the
taptic engine
would you say looking at that but there
might be room around that corner of the
phone for an additional
port maybe a jack okay kyle is a 3.5
millimeter jack he's going to be it sure
seems to me that it would fit just fine
kyle will never stop lamenting the
headphone jack i'm gonna get scotty over
at strange parts to add a headphone jack
i i will not buy an iphone until they
put a headphone jack back
uh personally i'm a i've switched to
android i'm very happy with my pixel
uh this is a this is a 3a and i got my
headphone jack there it's fantastic
wait what's your daily driver i don't
actually know it's a pixel 3a
the 4a is great great phone the 4a right
now is
uh is mike is uh google's fastest phone
uh which is which is devastating for the
pixel 5. uh but you can get
the fastest uh android phone uh rather
not the fastest
the fastest google phone uh with a
headphone jack in the 4a and it's
quite affordable you can for the price
of the
iphone 12 pro max you can buy like four
pixel 3as
because you would why would you want
four
when's the last time you owned an iphone
uh my last iphone was the 6s
which had a headphone jack i had that
was that was the phone i like learned
repair on
so that's the phone i had here and i
fixed it and that one's near and dear to
my heart
so let's talk about the taptic engine a
moment this guy uh so there's a vibrator
inside we have
uh if you go back to some of our our
past teardowns you'll see we've x-rayed
uh the the vibrator in this is it's a
very cool technology
but of course the taptic engine and all
the all the magnets in the iphone are
rare earth magnets those rares
come from a mining process that's
incredibly environmentally toxic
95 of the world's rarest come from china
uh the rarest uh
in in this magnet originally
uh probably came from uh the bao tau
rare earth complex in inner mongolia
which is in northern china
it has been called one of the most toxic
places on earth
bloomberg described it as the dystopian
lake filled with the world's tecnolust
it is a
incredibly toxic process to mine and
manufacture rarest
so apple knows that this is a major
problem and they are sourcing recycled
material to make the tactic engines they
say all the taptic engines are using
recycled rares
that's cool what they don't mention is
that they are not
recycled rares from iphones they found
some industrial process somewhere
that they're sourcing the rares from
probably those rares that they're
sourcing would have done would have gone
into a landfill somewhere so it's good
that that apple is using recovered
material in this uh but don't be fooled
by thinking that
apple is recycling iphones and
recovering the rares from it
um there's an article about that right
where it was like apple's worth its
weight in gold
remember yes we see reporting all the
time where apple will
release a a environmental report and
they'll say hey yeah we recovered 2 000
tons of gold
from electronics that we recycled last
year and so everyone says
apple got 2 000 tons of gold from
iphones no that's not what happened
apple is legally required under
california law
and laws in a number of other states to
collect or to to buy recycling credits
from recyclers and so
recyclers will collect dell computers hp
old tvs
they collect all that together apple
buys the recycling credits from them to
tell the government hey we recycled this
much product
um but when when you hear apple talking
about how much gold they have recovered
in recycling
that's not recycling their products or
even apple doing recycling with a fancy
machine like daisy
it's apple doing what they were legally
required to do
apple's environment team is really good
at saying one thing that lets you
lead you down the path to believe
they're they're doing something that you
would think it would be rational for
them to do without them actually doing
it
so kyle there's definitely a this tactic
engine is a different size it's a lot
taller
and this way words are failing me uh and
usually we're used to seeing the long
rectangular skinny ones
what do you think that will do for this
phone does that that the tactic engine
is bigger
it's just a different size it's a lot
taller and well you have a lot more mass
that you need to move so think about a
vibrator in order for it to have the
same kind of
feel in a bigger device with you know
substantially more mass right that phone
is a lot heavier than
the 12. but how does it feel compared to
the mini that you've got there
uh i gave the mini away handed the mini
i did i handed it off
mini is involved in terrain but i mean
substantially heavier so if you think
about
creating that vibration effect in a much
larger phone uh you have to move a
larger amount of mass to have the same
kind of sense of feel of the phone
vibrating in your hand
so it would i would imagine the taptic
engine is proportionally larger
i guess you could also shake uh shake it
faster
but i have a feeling that they're
already vibrating about as fast as they
can
i'm just going to remove the sim tray
because we always forget we've got a
question what are our favorite repairs
i gotta say my favorite repairs i'm i i
do
electronics so much at work that i get
home and i don't want to work on
electronics anymore
um so my last repair was my tractor
uh i i uh i just uh i don't know if this
is a repair last repair or ongoing
repair
wait it's an ongoing repair absolutely
but the thing that i did on sunday was
uh the the headlights uh stopped working
and rather than replace
or fix the aging headlights i added a
blinging new led light bar to it
so my my tractor can light up the
neighborhood
all right so i'm trying to get the
taptic engine out i'm trying to get the
speaker out here but
it looks like there's a cable that is
sandwiched
around the taptic engine so i'm trying
to free the taptic engine
and there's lots of tiny screws i'm
probably not doing a great job of
showing this off but
if you guys want to see anything closer
let me know or i'll just
keep going with this massacre obvi wants
a shout out hey abby
hey i hear you're suave and handsome
whoa
yeah that's it i've never heard you say
those words before here we are
here we are 2020 anything can happen so
jan wants to know what does a two-part
battery say about longevity great
question and i want to talk about
batteries for a while
because i mentioned that it's this paper
folding process
to make one of these batteries well that
works fine if it's square like this but
when you have a
l-shaped battery like the iphone 10 has
and like we've got in the 12-pro max
it's a very different folding process
and so it's almost like origami
the process of folding it and can you
show you see on the edge
basically the notch there and then the
battery um
this guy yeah so so that that sort of
like curve
in in the battery where they they
actually are not so there's actually
dead space
can you point it at the the corner there
in the battery
yeah that that there so there's actually
dead space there um so there's this
fascinating uh you know l-shaped origami
thing that they fold in
in order to get the additional space
that that cut out there in the battery
is actually totally wasted space inside
the iphone
and it's there for thermal expansion
because they're concerned that if they
if they filled in that space and they
had it budding right up against it and
you had thermal expansion it could be a
source of
compromise to the battery it could cause
a thermal runaway event and be a safety
problem and so apple's
origami pattern is is designed
to be safe but but fill in the l-shape
but it's substantially
harder to manufacture took out the
little speaker girl with me
so there's just a piece of tape that's
holding the taptic engine and the
speaker together but
here it is i will probably pass it off
to kyle because he can do some nice
comparisons um we'll set that over here
and the thing with the speaker
that came out a lot easier than the
speaker on the 11. yeah way
easier and this year the uh the speaker
isn't
like there's a ton of adhesive and gunk
that usually like holds the speaker on
so if you do need to replace the speaker
it should be a lot easier
and um kyle and i were remarking earlier
that like this is
so weird to find an orange piece inside
orange yeah it's very strange can you
someone tell me right here
can we see it there yeah i so we got an
orange gasket look at that
i don't have i am just baffled why it's
orange
uh apple likes to make everything in the
phone look um looks so pristine and
clean
and i mean they go out of their way to
have all the cables be unmarked and
black
and they just like steve jobs would talk
about how
uh you know his dad was a carpenter and
the back of the cabinet was as important
as the front of the cab you want the
whole thing to look
look good all the way through and we see
that where
samsung clearly does not care as much
about what the internals look like
inside their phone they've got grain
boards they've got mismatched colors
they've got scuffing apple is polishing
inner surfaces here in ways that are not
completely necessary
so i would love to know why this gasket
is orange i think it's cool it certainly
calls
your attention to it it looks really
nice on this green
green iphone but we definitely
appreciate the gasket it makes
repairing this thing a lot easier in
general when you're waterproofing a
device gasket you can glue it together
and waterproof it or you can use gaskets
and waterproof
gaskets are always going to be a
superior uh for for
repair and remanufacturing so i
typically never
i mean i usually i usually just do
battery replacements on iphones they
don't do full disassemblies
so i believe that it's taylor in the
room taylor
it's modular this year right so the sim
tray is modular and it wasn't in
previous years
uh it was only modular in the iphone 11.
okay
so sim tray was modular in the 11 but um
yeah
but now it's integrated so we'll see yep
we'll see what that means for
serviceability generally the sim trays
don't usually
don't usually break so i'm not super
concerned about that but it is
i got the camera shield off and then i
didn't pull off the camera and i don't
know why that was the part i was gonna
do first
let's get into the cameras so um
finishing up our conversation
about the battery uh the um
the overall design of all of the 12
models really seemed designed to cram 5g
into the phone and 5g is a
significant cost increase and so apple
was looking at how can we cut costs
in this device and also make room for
um make room for the 5g antennas and i
think on
on all the 12 models except the pro max
part of how they they cut cost
was going with a rectangular battery our
costs the batteries that we sell the
l-shaped batteries cost us about twice
as much
as as the rectangular batteries so it's
not surprising at all but
that's an area apple shaved some cost
off the battery went unfortunately with
smaller batteries than we would have
preferred on
on all the 12 models except the pro max
in exchange for paying qualcomm
a pound of flesh for the 5g modem
especially since last year
we had like the dual connector battery
and they did a lot of fancy things with
their battery i think that was the
biggest surprise
um just going back to the rectangular
battery uh so here i wanted to talk
really quickly about the cameras
obviously the cameras are like the new
cool whiz bang feature with the
sensor shift um and i think i'm going to
pass this off to taylor
maybe to uh he's going to get the heat
gun out
and try to get us a closer look while i
keep disassembling thank you
so with the sensor shift we've got two
levels of of stabilization you have the
traditional
optical stabilization that we're
accustomed to where i can i can touch
the camera sensor and it's going to
jiggle in here
um so that uh you know that is a passive
mechanical element that is
is stabilizing the the camera which
helps you when you're you know moving
around the
camera obviously needs to be stable take
a clean picture
with this one the actual sensor behind
the lens instead of the lens moving
where the lens has a lot of mass
the sensor is a lot lighter and it can
it can move faster
in response to to movement so we'll see
if we can pop this open and get a feel
we haven't seen one
inside one of these 12 pro max lenses uh
and i'm i'm
excited uh to get in there this is of
course you know why would you get the 12
pro max rather than the
uh the 12 pro uh the big reason is is
the
improved camera so this is my least
favorite part about
repair which is these adhesive strips
and i know adhesive strips are great and
they're a lot better because we're not
gluing the battery down and they should
come right out but
i think my success rate on getting these
out cleanly
i think i'm i don't know what batting
averages are but it would be like
two out of 25. that would that's what it
would be when it's all about
you get a professional tech and they're
better at it sometimes you heat them up
it helps
i often times cheat and i have some
adhesive remover next to me if i can't
pull this out very quickly but i'm gonna
try with the tweezers
uh a lot of people say uh get the
tweezers out and
wrap it around them but it still takes
me forever or wrapping around the
spudger or if you have tips drop it into
the chat people usually
like to tell me how to do things so yeah
you do it these pull strips are just one
of those things you really have to have
finesse for
we definitely appreciate them we like we
like having them over and above
the regular adhesive that you get in a
phone like this uh but
uh they still are finicky we actually we
we talked with the adhesive engineers at
the manufacturers who actually make
these strips and we said hey what's your
tip
on opening it up and they said oh we
don't really know we have problems with
them too
really yeah and so we showed them our
process we're like well this is how
we're doing it this is how we're
teaching people to do it and they said
yeah that seems as good as anything
we've seen
okay um so it's not like we haven't
tried
uh one thing that i've noticed is when
you get an older phone the adhesive gets
a little bit more brittle
they're what seem less likely to break
on a new phone than once the phone's
been around for a couple years
and that's usually when you do the
battery replacement so almost all the
strips i've used uh they've been really
brittle and they break so this
phone's brand new we just got it from
the apple store so we shouldn't have
this many problems
but says you should use the opening pick
to push those strips away
tobias why didn't you tell me that
earlier
so tobias is coming to us from the
future uh tobias
is uh one of our engineers at a
stuttgart and he has been
working on uh these new phones for
several hours we're here in california
so we're eight hours behind europe uh so
he got his hands on some of these things
a little bit earlier
normally we would be in australia right
now and our toilets would be flushing
the other way
but due to a global pandemic
your tear down is being delivered a
little bit later than usual and
so tobias has been helping us at least
remedy some of those time zone woes
everyone's just saying go for the
isopropyl alcohol you guys want me to
just go for the alcohol or keep
struggling with these strips
should also make kyle struggle with
these strips so jeff neet wants to know
does it show any kind of error when you
uh replace the display we'll find out
we've been part swapping on the
on the 12 and we didn't have any
troubles swapping the display aside from
loss of true
tone as we're accustomed to
oh you do get in there
okay so it says this is not a genuine
apple display even if you're installing
a genuine apple display
and allow me to rant for a moment while
kk works on the battery
so this is incredibly frustrating if you
take two brand new iphone 12s and you
swap the displays it should not
tell you this is not a genuine apple
display of course it's a genuine apple
display it just came off of an iphone
12.
what it's really saying is you uh
do not have the fancy software that
apple only distributes to their apple
geniuses
to swap the display and then calibrate
it the way that they calibrate it in the
factory and so you they plug a laptop in
the laptop has a cryptographic
signing key from apple that that says
hey did you get it
uh no i you broke the first one yes all
right
and i put my tweezers i wrapped it
around and now they're stuck together
which is pretty cute so uh
yeah glued together tweezers yeah so
it's this fancy
uh diagnostic tool that apple has um
that they won't give to the rest of us
and that's that's incredibly infuriating
i find it a little bit
almost i think it feels like they're
infantilizing their customers they're
saying
you're good enough to give us money uh
but you're not good enough to
you know swap the screen on the device
that you already paid us
you know over a thousand dollars for
this is uh
it's frustrating it needs to change uh
hopefully uh we will get a right to
repair law passed
uh and if right to repair passes apple
we'll have to make that that diagnostic
software available to the rest of us
um if you've been following along in the
right to repair world uh last month
well last month this election last week
felt like last month every every week is
a month in 2020.
last week we had a number of election
results the election result that i was
most glued to that i was most excited
about was question one in massachusetts
which
was an automotive right to repair
initiative for wireless
repair information that passed
overwhelmingly 75 percent of people in
the great bay state of massachusetts
voted in favor of uh right to repair
it's fantastic and what that means is
that the next generation of cars
you'll be able to access the information
from the repair systems on your car
wirelessly maybe in the mobile app
so major major win for rachel repair uh
now we need to get the right to repair
our phones just like we have for cars
how is the battery training i'm cheating
and i'm using adhesive remover
okay i don't know if it's cheating it's
just isopropyl alcohol that's true
i just really wanted to get the strips
but that's fine
uh while i do that i'm gonna start gonna
let the adhesive remover
do its thing and start working the logic
board out
okay okay so we got a question what is
the easiest way to get the screen off
this is something that is really
different with these phones i think it's
probably going to be the biggest
adaptation that we have to make with the
with the 12 compared to the 11 um and
previous iphones the previous phones
you use suction cup we might apply a
little bit of heat you have a
waterproofing
adhesive gasket around the edge of the
phone um
but uh you know a good amount of heat
and prying
then you can get an edge and then you
can work around it with with the
guitar pick and you didn't have to get
very much uh
give because the glasses above the the
display and so we could we could insert
the the pick
into the edge between the aluminum uh
and the glass because the glass is
recessed on the 12
it makes it more challenging um and so
what uh we kind of have to go back to
first principles with adhesive and say
what are the things that loosen adhesive
well
the things that lose the adhesive are
temperature and pressure
and so what we need to do to get the
adhesive loosened on on the the 12 pro
with its increased
you know drop resistance increased
waterproof rating
is we need to apply pressure and
consistent heat all the way along
and then it you have to you have to
apply
quite a bit of pressure over time i've
seen people
pulling too hard and popping the suction
cup off you got to basically apply the
maximum pressure that you can with the
suction cup
for a period of time uh and and let that
adhesive
slowly pull loose it doesn't pull loose
as fast as the 11
and previous iphones do you have to you
have to apply consistent pressure over
time
and so to make room for 5g this year
you'll see that there are these antennas
all the way around the battery and so we
have less of kind of
a well to wiggle with as in previous
iphones so
got to be a little bit more careful but
let's see if it's is it loosening
it's getting there i'm always pretty
timid to use
a lot of alcohol because i don't want to
get it on other things but yeah
all right so we've got an aasp which is
an apple authorized service writer
describing the apple technique and this
is this is totally correct and we have
tried this technique i don't find this
any more effective than oh it isn't
what kkk has been trying but use the
black stick which is a spudger
so use a spudger and use the pointy end
to roll the adhesive strips like
spaghetti up which is what k.k was
trying to do using the tweezers she was
rolling it onto the tweezers
we wiggle the adhesive to the left or
right side and that makes a little bit
easier
perfectly reasonable and it's really
just one of those knacks where if you do
this a lot
you get a lot better at it yeah and kkk
is not taken by iphones every day
and usually i take them apart for
friends or family or
you know do battery placements but we're
all at home so nobody has me doing this
and we're doing a lot of these teardowns
remote so a lot of the times
uh my engineers will let me like do some
parts testing and
take apart a few components but i'm
never usually doing the whole thing and
i don't have that practice either
because we're all at home
but we're almost there taylor how's it
going with the
sensor pretty well
taylor's getting his way into the iphone
camera sensor meanwhile yonks king wants
to know in the u.s do you guys have to
implement right to repair in every state
or can we do all states at once
so a few ways we could do this one
approach would be to get congress to
pass a law
unfortunately the u.s congress is kind
of
dysfunctional we have the democrats in
charge of one branch we have the
republicans in charge of another and so
getting something all the way through
both branches of congress is really
challenging
but at the u.s state level it's a lot
more promising and you can do a state
ballot measure which is what
happened with all the right to repair or
the state legislatures can pass bills
which is how most laws gets passed
and and that's what we're trying to do
with right to repair over 20 different
u.s states so far
in 2020 have introduced right to repair
bills
honestly we don't have to pass it in
every state if just a few states pass it
very likely manufacturers will make that
information available for everybody
all over the place in addition it's not
just in the us and europe uh europe
passed some lightweight right to repair
legislation for
uh refrigerators and other heating and
cooling devices last year
and they're looking to do the same thing
with smartphones france is going to
be starting to require repairability
ratings so you know here they fix it we
love
scoring everything from one to ten on
how easy or hard it is to fix well
france is rolling out repairability
scoring system
starting january 1st at any retailer in
france you'll be able to find out
how easy or hard it is to fix your
iphone 12 pro max
you got it out i got it out it's out
that actually wasn't too bad
so did show us the back of it did you
peel the adhesive off already
uh no it's still on here actually wow
look at that so it
it just loosen it right up yeah is this
anybody in the audience are these
different adhesive strips or is this
what they always look like
i haven't worked on anything past and
eight same it's the same
so i'll grab those out now or you could
leave them in
yeah i guess i could leave them in i
just i really hate being sticky
uh i'm going to get
one more shield off and then i think i
can get the board out
so i just got these in the mail i'm
super excited about this this has
nothing to do with the iphone 12 but
this
is uh motherboard our friends over at
vice have a new
physical zine and so this is called the
mail i think the cover is absolutely
fantastic
and lorenzo and jason kobler and all of
our friends over at motherboard have
been working on it
uh the rise and fall of leet speak and
have a hack ascii and all kinds of
hacker fashion manifestos this thing is
super cool very jazz thanks
motherboard for sending that over i have
the camera ready
oh yeah you got the camera open let's
check that out
yeah bring it on over here and i'm i'm
really curious to see i want to see how
this sensor image stabilization works
yeah this is the first the first uh i
don't think anybody has cracked this
open yet so
we'll be going into detail on this in
our in our photo tear down but you guys
get the first
glance at it so this is the 12 pro max
the wide sensor that's the the new one
and you can see this is like the module
and then you can open it up and inside
is the sensor
it's so big it's really big and then
the this whole plate where the center is
moves around
and that's different from this is one of
the other cameras from the iphone 12 pro
max
and you can see on this one the lens is
what moves around so that's optical
image stabilization
and then this like kyle was like kyle
was saying this is sensor shift
stabilization so
the sensor is actually the thing that's
doing the moving around
and i would love to see the raw output
from these and see what the different
characteristics are because it's just
are you moving the front or are you
moving the back
and it's obviously going to have big
implications on the image but i could
not
intuitively tell you off the top of my
head without being an optical engineer
what the what the difference is if
anybody has
guesses i mean clearly you're um
you're going to get sort of more fine
control you've got a larger surface
moving
um uh i'm the sensor is so big i
originally i said that the mass of the
sensor would be less than the mass of
the lens but now i don't know
probably still yes but uh wow
that's a big change so the logic board
has as you can see it's connected
through here so it looks like there is
a black sticker that is covering up all
those antennas so i'm going to peel that
off
and then i'm expecting to find some more
brackets and i'll
unscrew those and then i should be able
to get the antennas off and finally free
the board
so we're almost there
so people want to know what tool kit
we're using here uh we have
a variety of tools but the the new tool
that we're super jazzed to be showing
off
yeah you can check it out so this is our
brand new tool kit we have not
previously announced this you were all
getting
this is like the first this is the first
time this is being shown on camera
so this is the minnow and it's it's very
small
um i absolutely love this and it has all
of
just like the most popular bits that
you'd need so the y triple zero which
there's a ton of y triple zero screws in
here um
let's see but we heard from people that
absolutely loved our mako kit uh but
wanted something a little bit more
portable that they could throw in a
backpack or a pocket that they could
kind of have with them on the road all
the time i wish i had something
and uh so we said all right let's let's
make a kit that
is you know sort of more travel friendly
for the road warrior fixers
so this is the iphone pro max for scale
and
this is it's just absolutely adorable i
i want all small tool kits a couple of
years ago we did
an april fool's joke where we made the
micro tech tool kit because
which is right behind you oh yeah it's
behind me actually yeah let's show the
microtech toolkit next to the minnow
this is the toolkit for mice there it is
uh and so we actually recruited a
hamster to be
a part of a video and he used the
microtech tool kit
to repair all of his hamster electronics
so the minnow might be a little big for
a hamster but it's going to be very
small
and somehow kyle still keeps me around
even though i do things like put
hamsters in
videos so we will have more info for you
on
the new minnow kit but we couldn't be
more excited we'd be working hard on
this thing all year
of course we had to be very careful with
our bit selection we weren't able to fit
all 64 of the bits in in the mako so we
put the most important bits in the
middle kit if you've never taken apart
an iphone before
it just it's chock full of all these
weird screws
that you probably don't have a driver
for every year it feels like we find
a new screw type that we have to deal
with so
i don't remember when they started
putting the standoff bit in there
yeah and what are you using for all
these standoffs our standoff
which i actually didn't have because i
had a really old version of our protech
at my house and i realized that i didn't
have a standoff bit the other day
uh so if you're if you're buying a 12
pro max you're probably doing it because
of the camera so what's what's the big
difference with the camera the 12 point
pro max well you got the telephoto lens
with the 4x optical zoom
it's a 2.2 aperture uh if you're not a
photo geek and i have to explain what
aperture is to you
you probably shouldn't be buying a 12
pro max but what if i want to take
low light photos of my cat yes then you
should know about aperture
it's actually it's so funny that apple
doesn't reveal tech specs on anything
else like they won't tell you
the clock speed of the processor they
won't tell you how much ram is in the
phone
but they will tell you that it's a 2.2
aperture camera
uh and uh and then the wide
uh the wide lens is a 1.6 aperture
and and that's where you know the big
deal is on this 12 pro max is that
sensor is so large
and you've got it there do you want to
show that sensor again because i'm just
yeah
continue to be blown away because this
is always the big difference between
like an slr
camera uh right your traditional pro
cameras have huge lenses that's what
we're shooting this with and that is an
slr
and then i mean this is nowhere near
even
the sensor size of like a micro four
thirds camera but it's still
very very large for a um
for a for a phone this is a substantial
wow it's big yeah i mean again i say big
it is big for
phone i can't remember the specs is it
87
bigger or 47 percent bigger i'm positive
it is one of those numbers
someone on the chat someone in the chat
will probably know uh so this
this sensor is made by sony uh this is a
major win for sony sony also is moving
big
into time-of-flight camera uh sensors
and i'm pretty sure
sony is making i've got the the samsung
s20 here
and this has a time-of-flight depth
sensor here
and that time-of-flight depth sensor is
um is i'm sure made by sony and that's
i'm measuring how long it takes uh i
don't know if
i would guess it's photons to go from
from the camera out and back
and so it's doing a depth of map that
way the iphone
12 pro max does it in a very different
way i should show off real quickly uh
i have it here somewhere oh here is the
the lidar from the 12.
uh it's a piece of plastic not a lidar
you didn't pay enough money for a lidar
if you just buy a regular uh 12 but if
you buy the 12
pro or the 12 pro max you get lidar um
and and can you kind of point out where
the lidar is at
as we're pulling things out it should be
over here
yeah yeah so it'll be there okay so how
does the lidar work
well this is um using the same
kind of technology that we have seen in
um yeah is it is it using the uv
dot pattern the way that the previous
ones yeah the name for red light
yes so it's a it's a is it i mean
is it really a lighter if it's infrared
then
well
so the way that the infrared dot pattern
work is you have the infrared projector
and it projects a dot
grid pattern on the world um we uh
uh we uh did that with our cat and with
michael's cat
and not my cat unfortunately and then it
calculates the
uh the distance between the dots and
then it can create a depth map of the
world which is basically
everything the camera sees at this you
know how how far apart
uh each item is from each other and then
of course the number of dots
uh is the resolution of that depth map
uh this technology originally came from
a little israeli company called
indensense at
israel and then then sends power the
original microsoft connect
so the connect for the xbox where you
could dance and play you know dance
revolution and it would
see what you were doing and it worked
okay the connect was never a runaway
success
because the sensor wasn't quite great
and it was also kind of big and it would
overheat
with the the the follow-up connect
microsoft actually had to use their own
technology because
apple bought and then sense and took the
technology and micro
sized it so that they could fit into the
iphones
there is literally just a sticker away
from me pulling these antennas out
that's it that's all i got
and then we should be good then i can
hop on the mini chair down with the rest
of the team
since we're talking about antennas let's
talk about the major new feature of the
iphone 12
series which is 5g uh are you excited
about 5g
not yet is anyone in the chat excited
about 5g i really am curious today the
verge cast said that
our like us has like the slowest 5g
we did all of the tests sasha over at pc
magazine did some
some benchmarking drove all around the
country and found that in general 5g was
slower than 4g
so yeah i am i am really really curious
please someone in the chat if you are
excited about 5g
speak up uh because i'm not
and i haven't talked to anybody are any
of you guys excited about 5g
everyone is shaking their head and yet
in apple's keynote they talk about 5g 5g
5g
everybody talking about 5g here's here's
my my theory
yeah everybody says nah okay nosh says
yes
driven by vlad says yes everyone else
says no
um so here here's my my theory is that
5g is all about the carriers uh one
they're being driven to where they have
more more uh more uh frequency available
so they've got more spectrum on the 5g
side so there's kind of a cost factor to
push them that way
but they also want to push people they
want to push everybody onto 10 a month
more expensive plan verizon's plan
instead of 45
a month per line 55 per month per line
if you want millimeter wave 5g
uh so this whole thing of all the
carriers
or all the phone manufacturers moving is
really being driven by the carriers i
don't think apple really wanted to put
5g
in this year's phone i think that they
were kind of forced to
strong-arm too the uh they used
qualcomm's
x55 uh which we're assuming the 12 pro
max is the same x55 as the other iphone
12s
we'll confirm that later the the x55
is a 7 nanometer manufacturing process
modem it is not qualcomm's newest 5g
modem that is the snapdragon x60
which is manufactured i assume by tsmc
on their five nanometer process
um which is i mean the the uh the
a14 processor in these things is being
manufactured on that five nanometer
process
um all right i'm stuck on one bit and
it's right here
and so that's its problem i don't know
what its problem is oh i'm not focusing
very well anyways it's
right above the sensor shield and i'm
using my standoff bit and it's
definitely a standoff screw and it's not
coming out so
that's that i will keep working on that
but after we get the board out that was
pretty much where i was going to stop
anyways
we've got this double here um hey taylor
could you maybe help me with this
the same as on previous models this
double layered board
uh i mean so this allows them to
basically have you know four sides of a
board instead of two
in the same space they're being um
they are being uh very sort of yeah
space efficient by going 3d and stacking
stacking chips so this gives them
at least four chips that they can stack
on top of each other without layering
chips into something like a single
package like the soc
uh the a14 soc has lots and lots of them
packed into
a single chip so how did you do it so
quickly
i've taken off like 10 000 of these
today of course my last one
got a little bit stuck all right we got
that off cool and we're good
so can you walk us through kind of where
all these 5g antennas are inside the
phone
so there are around the right perimeter
of
the phone so they go down this side
um let's see here we have a question
what's the difference between 5g
millimeter wave versus normal 5g and are
they different antennas
they're different antennas they're
different frequencies they're different
bandwidths
when when snap when qualcomm talks about
the 5g modem rf they call it a system
it's really a whole bunch of different
frequencies it's a whole bunch of
technologies packed together
millimeter wave is pretty substantially
different from all other 5g
um and realistically uh you're not going
to see millimeter wave 5g
unless you live in one of the biggest
cities in the world for a very long time
joanna stern had to go to dodgers
stadium to get that was one of my
favorite videos
it's a fantastic video she set up her
office in the center of dodgers safe but
realistically
uh nobody's going baseball games right
now and uh i mean all the tech reporters
um that i know have had to have
basically a verizon rep
with them to take them to the exact spot
the exact portion of the street
corner that millimeter wave is going to
work on so the whole thing is a sham it
is crazy that we are spending
as much money um and the tech companies
are spending as much time
and energy putting millimeter wave into
these things they've really just been
pushed by the carriers uh because
verizon wants that extra comeback
from you the board is out okay there we
go there you go
so let's compare that board you want to
hand her this is the uh this is the 12
board
and let's compare the 12 pro max to the
12 board
all right so
there oh wow yeah so this is obviously
so that doesn't have the cable
integrated onto it the antennas
oh no it oh it does okay um
yeah so different a little bit of a
different shape same with the
taptic engines so they definitely squash
things down and they're different sizes
so it'll be interesting to see
i don't know when we'll pull the shields
off and we'll get a much better look in
our step-by-step teardown
but just wanted to give you guys the
first look at all the differences
so with that i was only planning on
getting to the boards
so uh do you want to kind of talk lay
out all the components give us a little
bit of a knoll
of what's going on there yeah sure um
while you set that up i'll
uh uh finish ranting about 5g
let's talk about cost this thing i mean
these phones are so expensive
and a huge amount of that cost is going
to qualcomm apple wanted to build their
own 5g modem they bought the intel unit
that made the modem for them and uh
intel didn't didn't deliver the original
plan was for an intel modem
intel didn't deliver so apple bought the
division and apple is working on their
own 5g modem but it's not ready in time
for these devices and so
you know apple doesn't like qualcomm
qualcomm powers all of their competitors
android phones and apple feels like in
qualcomm is totally ripping them off
on licensing fees we've seen this
massive lawsuit between these two
behemoths
you know if apple had their choice they
wouldn't pay qualcomm
a single dime and yet here they are
handing over hundreds of millions of
dollars
to qualcomm for these 5g modems and
their latest flagship phones
you know it really has to call apple
where they talk about how we're verbally
and
vertically integrated company we own all
our technology uh to then have to have
the major flagship feature
in their flagship 2020 phone um be
designed built manufactured and profited
by
uh qualcomm so i would be looking to the
future looking the apple jumping off the
qualcomm bandwagon
as fast as they possibly can you know
johnny struggie is pushing his
team of expert silicon engineers to
build a 5g modem quickly
but in the meantime here is your
qualcomm powered
x55 powered iphone 12 pro max
and there it is all right that's it
that's all i got
cool that's it that's our
yeah so uh we're just getting started on
no we're not just getting started we are
very
in the middle of teardown season so we
are doing the iphone 12 mini
in the other room right now like kyle
said earlier our team in germany got a
head start on that
and then we'll be doing the iphone 12
pro max this weekend
please uh give our content some eyeballs
because
the team has just been pulling all a ton
of late nights we did the xbox earlier
this week we did the ps5
yesterday wow that was yesterday and
then there was an apple event on tuesday
so
we will be seeing the macbook air the
mac mini
and the macbook pro with the apple
silicon and the m1 chip
so lots going on if you like this live
stream let us know
uh because we don't go to australia it's
a fun way to give you guys a first
look inside devices before you know
launch day or on launch day
but that's all i got thanks for bearing
with me taylor how'd i do
did you okay sweet cool
well thanks for joining me kyle it's
always nice to see you
this is a blast yeah i'll see you all
next time bye guys
you