iFixit has been known for floating a detailed tear down of the latest gadgets and devices on the web, as soon as they are available. Guess the new iPad wasn’t something they were gonna miss. While the launch of the new iPad is less than a day old, iFixit has already torn down the tablet and revealed its details, which are listed below.
The regular tear down of the iFixit folks starts with first heating the adhesive so as to make the initial ‘opening up’ a little easier. However, according to them, the design of the new iPad in consistent with Apple’s earlier tablets in that disassembling it, making common repairs or replacing the battery is very difficult. And that such a design poses significant adverse environmental impact.
The display:
The LCD in the new iPad is very firmly attached to the front panel so that you can’t remove the front panel without also removing the LCD too. The two are attached with foam sticky tape. There is a connector for the front panel which holds it in place but it is placed under the LCD. So if you ever are unfortunate enough to break the glass on the display, you will have to dissemble the tablet right to the battery and logic board to accomplish this. That doesn’t fare as a very good design, at least for a user. Also, the model numbers on the back of the LCD indicates that it may be from Samsung, one of the largest Apple suppliers.
A significant revelation made by iFixit is that the connectors of iPad 2 and the new iPad are not the same. This means that they can’t be used inter-changeably and are incompatible to each other.
New iPad Battery:
The battery of the new iPad is very firmly attached to the back of the casing with the help of glue. This, again can pose environmental as well as health and safety hazards, according to iFixit. That is because if the battery breaks down, or is punctuated, it will stay glued to the tablet and result in an explosion. So a more safer design would’ve been letting the users remove the battery rather easily.
The size of the new iPad’s battery is significantly larger, probably because it has to supply greater juice for the upped hardware specs of the tablet. The size of each cell of the new battery has been increased by 70% percent, which would explain why this battery takes up to 70% percent greater time than iPad 2 to recharge.
Chips used in the new tablet:
It would seem that apart from the much-touted A5X processor, Apple has used a whole lot of chips in the new iPad. These include Texas Instruments CD3240 driver device, 2 x 4GB Elpida LP DDR2= 1GB DRAM in multiple packages of 64-bit configuration, Broadcom BCM4330 802.11a/b/g/n MAC/baseband/radio with integrated Bluetooth 4.0+HS and FM transceiver and other chips.
The A5X processor:
Sitting smugly inside the new iPad is the A5X processor which makes it all happen. It is a 1 GHz dual-core CPU and is said to offer quad-core graphics support. At the side of the tablet where A5X processor sits smugly are a number of other chips too which include the NAND, Qualcomm wireless model and others.
The size of this new processor, A5X is significantly larger than the A5 processor, being 36% larger than its predecessor. To be exact, it measures 12.82 mm x 12.71 mm.
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