we've been seeing peaks of Apple's
latest iPhone for months a home button
here a rear case there well that didn't
stop our excitement of getting our hands
on one so we sent our co-founder to
Australia to get our first look at the
iPhone 5s this is an S version which
means it's speedier more secure superior
or similar in form and function to its
predecessor whatever the S stands for we
want to take a look inside and a
teardown begin hi I'm Gwendolyn with
iFixit and today we're tearing down
Apple's new iPhone 5s not surprisingly
there haven't been many changes to the
outward appearance of the new iPhone it
has the same dimensions of the iPhone 5
123 point 8 millimeters in height 58
point 6 millimeters wide and just seven
point six millimeters thick and even the
weight comes in the same at 112 grams
one thing Apple has updated is the color
choices for this version of the iPhone
allowing you to choose between space
grey silver or gold and lastly we see
the display is exactly the same with the
resolution of 11 36 by 640 and a pixel
density of 326 but as with every s
revision of the iPhone the bulk of the
upgrades are deep inside the familiar
exterior so get your pentalobe drivers
out and let's dig right in opening the
phone is just like the iPhone 5 hooray
still no eye opener we just need a
pentalobe driver suction cup and a
little spudger action right away we meet
our first booby-traps
I mean assembly difference in the form
of a cable that connects the touch ID
sensor in the home button to the
Lightning port assemblies with a little
help from the flat end of our spudger we
make quick work of that obstacle and
we're able to get our first look inside
the phone and guess what it looks pretty
much like the iPhone 5 with the battery
taking up most of the inside we're happy
to see the slight upgrade from the
iPhone 5 coming in at three point eight
volts 1560 milliamp hours giving us a
boost of 10 hours of talktime from the
iPhone 5s 8 hours we'll take it we are
just itching to get our hands on the
much-anticipated home button and
ID sensor so let's touch on that the
iPhone 5s home button is now equipped
with a snazzy new CMOS chip we are
slightly worried about how well the
sapphire crystal covering the sensor can
protect it from degrading over time but
for now we're just going to be excited
about the cool upgrade the touch ID is
essentially a bunch of very small
capacitors that creates an image of the
ridges in your finger just think of it
as a selfie for your finger or more
accurately multiple finger selfies as
the touch ID sensor requires 5 to 10
images to fully capture your fingers
ridges speaking of selfies when we
uncover the iSight rear facing camera
we're pretty happy about the upgrades
here as well this 8.8 megapixel camera
has a 5 element lens with 2.2 aperture
giving it a 33% increase in light
sensitivity and thanks to some super
cool new software is capable of slo-mo
video at 720p and burst mode photography
sounds like fun as we turn our attention
to the logic board we find the heart of
this phone the chip we've all been
waiting to see this is the a7 processor
the a7 is the first 64-bit processor
found in a smartphone and thanks to its
updated arm v8 instruction set it's able
to increase performance and efficiency
without sacrificing battery life Abuk
claims the a7 will give you 2 times the
CPU and graphics performance of an a6 so
taking pictures shooting video and
playing games will be even more epic
with this processor 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 1 being the
most difficult the iPhone 5s scores a
out of ten four repairability and here's
why on the plus side and just like the
iPhone five you will only need a few
tools to replace the front panel
assembly but 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 of it
impossible but the final downside and
the reason for scoring a fix is the
battery there's no pull 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 and
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