iPhone X Teardown: The Logic Board Is Tiny and the Battery Is Gigantic

We're in Australia with iFixit tearing down the brand new iPhone X, which came out here about an hour ago (it was released at 8 AM local time). We bought the phone, hopped in a car, and raced across town to Circuitwise, an electronics manufacturer in suburban Sydney.

From there, we tossed it into an x-ray machine made by Creative Electron to see what's in the guts of the thing. As it turns out, there's a hell of a lot of battery; everything else has shrunk significantly. The teardown is really just getting underway, so expect more details later, but first impressions: This iPhone really is quite a departure from old models.

"The question is how Apple crammed in a Face ID system, kept the form factor, and somehow got more battery life," Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, told me as we tore it down. "The answer is billions and billions of dollars."

What this R&D got Apple is a Logic Board that is impossibly small, and appears to be stacked into multiple layers. That means everything needed to run the iPhone is much, much smaller: "It's a big deal from a semiconductor perspective, because it's challenging to make these things smaller."

The interior of the iPhone X, then, is made up of an OLED display, facial recognition sensors (more on that later—we're only about a third of the way done with the teardown), a two-celled battery, a very small Logic Board, and the dual cameras.

"The eventual trajectory of this is you have a screen, a battery, a camera, and a chip," Wiens said. "Shrinking the board—this is a big deal."

We're still tearing down the phone and will have a full writeup—as well as a video—in a couple hours.