The New iPad: A Teardownunder

Posted by qBitnaut on March 15, 2012 03:22 pm 4

Many of you are hastily refreshing your tracking pages and waiting anxiously for your new iPad's arrival. Many more are gathering in lines to nab the tablet in store. If you're in Australia you might already have your hands on the hot new item. As iFixit completes their first tear-down of the new iPad from the land down under let's take a look at what they've found.

Display

The beautiful and pixel dense display is reportedly made by none other than rival Samsung (based upon model number schema.) It had been believed that Sharp might be the new LCD supplier for Apple based on prior Wall Street Journal and analyst reports. The display is as already reported a 9.7 inch IPS LCD with 2048×1536 resolution.

Battery

To the eye the new battery pack is virtually identical to it's predecessor, but it is a secret technical marvel. Apple has increased the energy density of the lithium polymer batteries in the new iPad by nearly 70%. The new device is packing a 11,560mAh battery vs the previous generation's 6,930mAh pack. This will fuel all of the new iPad's power hungry components to deliver the same 9-10 hour battery life.

Screens, processors, and displays aside, the battery technology here might be the dark horse innovation for Apple's mobile devices. We could soon have much longer life out of future phones and laptops. It will be interesting to see what sort of engineering they've drummed up here: nanotubes, unicorn dust?

Storage

Contrary to what was shown in previously leaked images of the new logic board before the iPad announcement, Apple has not moved to Hynix NAND flash chips from the Toshiba chips found in the iPhone 4S. Apple is still offering the same 16, 32, and 64GB storage versions of the iPad.

Processor

The A5X is, as already reported, a dual core 1.0GHz A5 (Cortex A9) with the addition of a new quad core PowerVR SGX MP4+ GPU. The SoC looks to be manufactured by Samsung in the first week of 2012.

Memory

On the flipside of the logic board there are two Elpida LP DDR2 chips. Each package is 512 MB for a total of 1 GB of RAM for all of those new resource intensive apps and games.

Modems

Up first is the Broadcom BCM4330 802.11a/b/g/n MAC/Baseband/Radio including Integrated Bluetooth 4.0+HS and FM Transceiver. For the 3G/4G chips the Qualcomm RTR8600 and MDM9600 transceiver and baseband processor are uncovered.

With so many wireless bands... making a single world device is a tall order.

The new iPad also comes with a disclaimer that it will not function on Telstra's (Australia) LTE network. Qualcomm devices driving Telstra LTE modems have also been found to contain both the MDM9600 and RTR8600 chips. Curious as to whether or not this is a software restriction preventing access to the network.

Wrap-Up

The leaky boat that led up to the new iPad launch did not leave much to be discovered here. Many of the features were made known weeks before the release, but it is still nice to have some quality shots of the internals and unlock a few more secrets. The addition of LTE, increased RAM, beefier GPU, gorgeous display, and massive battery will surely spell continued success for Apple's latest tablet.

Source: ifixit.com

Images via iFixit.com

Update: Corrected the addition of the MDM9600 from the iFixit post.