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OMG! My new iPhone! In pieces!
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An iPhone 3G S deconstructed (ReadyRepair.com photo)
Watching Aaron Vronko disassemble a brand new perfectly good, still-has-that-new-smartphone-smell Apple iPhone 3G S reminds me of the scene from “The French Connection” where the cops think the heroin is hidden inside a beautiful new 1971 Lincoln Mark III.
They tear the entire car apart, find the drugs (beneath the rocker panels), put the entire car back together and return it to the unsuspecting, er, suspect. Vronko did the same thing to the new iPhone.
Vronko is with RapidRepair.com, a Web site associated with a consumer electronics repair center in Kalamazoo, Mich., where he is the service manager. The site dispenses advice on how to perform simple repairs on electronic devices. Vronko was one of the first in line to buy a 3G S at the Orange Boutique in Paris (Orange is a wireless carrier in Europe) and did the disassembly at BricoMac, an Apple repair service. He traveled to Paris (see photo below) to get the jump on competitors who’d have to wait several hours before the iPhone went on sale in the U.S. June 19. The disassembly of the 3G S and a repair guide are posted on his Web site:
Q. What is the point of disassembling a smartphone?
A: There are three main consumers of this information. One is people who are just interested in seeing what’s inside. It also allows us to make predictions about the capabilities of the device and make comparisons against competitors. Second, there are also a lot of small repair centers that may use those guides. But I think the single largest market is people who are looking to do their own [repairs]. We do repairs but also sell just parts and if someone is buying a part from us, we try to help them do the repair themselves. When we started doing repairs, we found that with about a quarter of the repairs it was apparent that somebody had tried to open it. A lot of times they were breaking stuff because they didn’t know what to do, so we said “Let’s help them.”
Q: It would seem to me that cracking open the case would be an easy way to void the warranty. Are most of these people doing repairs on a device out of warranty?
A: That or it’s probably because they dropped it, banged it or got it wet or something like that, and all those sorts of damage unfortunately void the warranty.
Q: In taking apart the iPhone 3G S what are some of the improvements you discovered over previous models?
A: The most notable is the Samsung Mobile Applications Processor (MAP). It was upgraded to the latest generation. And the MAP is a highly inclusive chip; it basically includes the CPU (central processing unit), the GPU (graphics processing unit), the memory controller and a lot of other functions that years ago would have all been on separate components. That allows you to save on costs and power and space. [Ready Repair made a comparison chart between the iPhone 3G S, previous generation iPhones and the Palm Pre, which he recently also disassembled as soon as it hit the market].
Q: How would you compare the iPhone 3G S to the Palm Pre in terms of its Mobile Applications Processor?
Actually the Pre is nearly identical in the capabilities from a pure performance standpoint. The most important elements are all the same. The CPU and GPU and the memory available are actually the same. [He noted the Pre comes only with an 8GB hard drive while the 3G S comes with either a 16GB or 32 GB hard drive, but that may not mean much given that Palm has fewer third party apps that would take up hard drive space. He speculated that Palm would increase hard drive size in subsequent models.]
Q: As you go about this disassembly process, what do you notice about how these devices are engineered?
A: I am amazed every time. It is incredible what they pack into such a small space and what they are able to do with it because I’ve seen the evolution from the very first iPod in 2001 to what they offer now and it is incredible the amount of development.
Vronko says the iPhone he bought in Paris doesn’t work in Michigan but only because it’s locked to the Orange carrier in Europe. But in every other respect, he put his 3G S back together and all the other functions work perfectly.
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