AppleInsider Staff
The repair wizards at iFixit wasted no time on Thursday getting their hands on the new iPad by traveling to Australia where it is officially on sale. Their disassembly offers a look at the 4G LTE wireless model.
The front panel of the new iPad was removed by using heat, guitar picks an opening tool, and heavy-duty suction cups. The disassembly also confirmed that pre-release components showing a new LCD connector cable were legitimate.
In removing the LCD panel, the solutions provider got a look at the back of the new Retina display. There, they found a model number naming scheme that suggests the panel for that particular model was built by Samsung.
Samsung was outed this week as the primary supplier of Retina displays for the new iPad, even though the company is one of Apple's primary competitors. It is also believed that LG Display Co. is building iPad Retina displays.
On the logic board is the new custom A5X processor, which features the same clock speed as the A5 CPU found in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, but adds a new quad-core graphics processor and a gigabyte of RAM. The CPU was also built by Samsung, and markings on it indicate it was manufactured in the first week of 2012.
The new 4G LTE iPad, identified by the model number A1389, also sports a larger 11560mAh battery. Interest in the live teardown updates was so great on Thursday that the company's website struggled to handle the traffic spike.
Other chips discovered on the new iPad logic board are:
- Texas Instruments CD3240 driver device
- Broadcom BCM4330 802.11a/b/g/n MAC/Baseband/Radio with Integrated Bluetooth 4.0+HS and FM Transceiver
- Epcos B4064 SAW filters
- Fairchild FDMC 6683
- Toshiba ZX0730 1123KLD
- Qualcomm RTR8600 (under the thermal pad)
- Broadcom BCM5973 I/O controller
For more details and pictures, check out the full teardown of Apple's third-generation iPad at iFixit.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Oliver Haslam
107 Comments
Nice 'gadget pron'!
- 1gb RAM (finally) = Check
- New GPU/same CPU = Check
- Very capable battery/same-ish size = Check
- New-ish camera module = Check
- New Display panel = Check
... and that's about it, as well as just enough to keep most users satisfied until about a year from now.
Nice 'gadget pron'!
- 1gb RAM (finally) = Check
- New GPU/same CPU = Check
- Very capable battery/same-ish size = Check
- New-ish camera module = Check
- New Display panel = Check
... and that's about it, as well as just enough to keep most users satisfied until about a year from now.
Lets be fair, the CPU wasn't going to be the limiting factor, so they just cranked up the GPU to accomodate all those extra pixels, which was definetly needed. The 1GB was also needed with the larger app sizes that we will be seeing with the new screen and is a very welcome upgrade. And really, the camera is something I just don't care about on a tablet. The screen is the selling point on this thing and rest of the upgrades seemed to focus on enhancing the experience of using that screen. I can't wait to get my hands on one, it might make me upgrade for my OG first gen ipad.
Edit: Also, there was no mention of the LTE. I have tethering on my 4G phone, so not really a draw for me, but early reports are that the verizon LTE ipad is crushing cable modem speeds.
Limited Legacy Phone Sized Storage: Check.
Google and Samsung will be out with android pad and Retina (a larger one is rumoured too) in a couple of months or so:Check.
Can't wait to use the 3rd Gen Ipad with the Retina Display: Check.
So definitely not the new 28nm LTE radios.
I can't believe Apple won the lawsuit in Germany preventing the sale of the Galaxy Tab and Samsung still sells them parts for the iPad.
really makes me wonder what the point of all the lawsuits are....... odd.