With the iPhone 16e landing in early adopters’ hands just yesterday, it was only a matter of time before the first one was deconstructed for YouTube entertainment.
Rewa Technology won the race, and you can now enjoy a sub-six-minute teardown to see the new handsets’ innards on display, with some interesting tidbits about what makes it tick along the way.
After removing a couple of screws, the iPhone is heated up to help loosen the frame, allowing the backplate to be removed with a pick. A few more screws and cables later and the battery is accessible. Like the iPhone 16, its cell doesn’t have pull tabs and instead relies on a “special adhesive that releases when an electric current is applied”.
This is where the first surprise arrives. We’d already heard — and seen through our own battery tests — that the iPhone 16e had a larger cell than the iPhone 16, but it appears reports of 3,961mAh were underselling it a little. According to this video, it’s actually 4,005mAh: 44mAh larger than the previous estimate, and 444mAh bigger than the one powering the iPhone 16.
But this isn’t down to Apple improving battery technology or using space more wisely, the video reckons. “Apple says the redesigned internal structure allows the iPhone 16e to accommodate a larger battery,” the video’s voiceover intones. “We say it’s the smaller camera that makes room for the larger battery.”
For some, that will be a payoff worth making, of course, just as the absence of MagSafe may not be a deal breaker for the iPhone 16e’s target market.
Elsewhere, you can clearly see the DNA of the iPhone 14 in the iPhone 16e, which perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise, given how similar the two handsets look. Nonetheless, it seems they both use a very similar Face ID-packing front-camera array thanks to the lack of Dynamic Island.
More surprisingly, Rewa Technology noticed that the screen connector was the same as that on the iPhone 14, and that presented an obvious opportunity.
“We swapped the iPhone 16e screen onto an iPhone 14, and to our surprise, it worked,” the video explains. This is a big deal: you would expect an iPhone to reject a screen transplant from a different model out of hand, but apparently that’s not the case here.
Finally, the video separates the motherboard to get a good look at the brand-new C1 modem chip and A18 processor. “The component distribution is not as compact as before, making the layering process easier,” the video notes. But “CPU repair has become more challenging as the A18 chip is embedded deeper.”
Despite this, the video is positive about its repairability overall, with the screen, battery and camera all getting positive notes.
This likely won’t be the last teardown video, and it will be interesting to see if iFixIt agrees with Rewa Technology’s verdict when it invariably breaks down the iPhone 16e.
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