The iPhone 4S gets torn apart for the world to enjoy

By Mike Dunn October 13, 2011

The fine folks over at iFixit have made a name for themselves by tearing apart the gadgets that we love, and they have continued that trend with the iPhone 4S. This teardown might lack some of the excitement that an iPhone 5 teardown would have, but there is still a few secrets to be learned under the iPhone’s glass and metal shell.

The phone’s innards are strikingly similar to those of the Verizon model of the iPhone 4, but do have a few modifications. One of the big questions surrounding the iPhone 4S was the amount of Ram installed. In the iPhone 4 there is 512MB of Ram, which for when it was released is a pretty healthy number. These days most premium phones are being shipped with 1GB of ram, and it was hoped that the iPhone 4S would follow that trend. Sadly the iPhone 4S still has 512MB of Ram, ifixit explained the situation by explaining the A5 processor has a marking for “two 2 Gb LPDDR2 die—for a total of 4 Gb—or 512 MB.”

Even though it might be disappointing on paper that the iPhone 4S only has 512MB of Ram, that does not mean the performance of the device will suffer. From what we can tell from early reviews of the device the phone’s performance is, “noticeably faster” than the iPhone 4.

One change that caught our attention is that Apple is using a different vibrating mechanism than the original iPhone 4. The iPhone 4S has what is called a linear oscillating vibrator as opposed to a counter-weighted vibrator. What this means is that the iPhone 4S should vibrated quieter and softer than the iPhone 4.

Ultimately iFixit feels that the iPhone 4S is still pretty difficult to repair, but if you happen to break something it won’t be impossible to fix it yourself.

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