Apple’s latest iPhones look a lot like their predecessors, in terms of design. But the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus have a few distinctive new features, including waterproof cases, a touch-sensitive home “button” that’s not a mechanical button anymore, and a single port that’s now used for connecting power, headphones, or anything else.

But it’s what’s inside that counts, right? Apple doesn’t typically recommend opening up the cases for its smartphones, but the folks at iFixit have posted a teardown guide for the iPhone 7 Plus.

iphone-7-plus-ifixit

Apparently the battery is relatively easy to replace (if you have the right tools), and iFixit says the waterproofing should prevent some common sources of damage… so you might not need to repair the phone.

But since they’ve already gone through the trouble, here are a few key things the iFixit teardown shows and/or confirms:

  • This is the first iPhone with 3GB of RAM.
  • The iPhone 7 Plus uses a Qualcomm MDM9654M LTE Cat 12 modem (although a ChipWorks teardown shows that the smaller iPhone 7 has an Intel modem).
  • While it looks like there are two speaker grilles on the bottom of the phone, there’s actually only one speaker there — the iPhone 7 Plus does support stereo audio, but that’s because the headset speaker at the top of the phone can also blast audio at a louder volume to act as a secondary speaker. The second grille on the bottom is just cosmetic.
  • The iPhone 7 Plus has a 2,900 mAh, 11.1 Whr battery, which is pretty much the same as the battery in the iPhone 6 Plus and a little larger than the battery for the iPhone 6s Plus. Thanks to other improvements, Apple says the new phone should get up to two hours of additional battery life.
  • Since there’s no headphone jack anymore, Apple had room for a large taptic engine, which powers the touch-sensitive home button.

It’s likely that the internals for the 4.7 inch iPhone 7 will look similar to those for the 5.5 inch iPhone 7 Plus… although the smaller phone has less RAM, a smaller battery, and single cameras on the front and back of the phone (while the iPhone 7 Plus has a dual-camera system on the back).

The iPhone 7 is available from Apple for $649 and up, while the iPhone 7 Plus starts at $769.

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7 replies on “iFixit iPhone 7 Plus teardown reveals what’s inside Apple’s phone with no headphone jack”

  2. I really doubt you’d get much (any?) stereo effect from speakers placed within a few inches of each other, so having two speakers would be a waste.

  3. “Since there’s no headphone jack anymore, Apple had room for a large taptic engine, which powers the touch-sensitive home button.”

    What? They didn’t find courage but some haptic feedback engine taking up the headphone jack’s space?

    1. I have yet to find any of this rumored magic that iPhones are supposed to have. And I repair them all the time. #Feelsbadman

      1. The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 works with magic smoke. Smoke comes out, phone stops working.

    3. Surely they could have used the space occupied by the massive bezels.

      Android phones like the Nexuses manage to find space for both a non-mechanical touch button and a headphone socket, without needing massive bezels either.

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