What’s Inside The New iPhone? Teardown Reveals New Details About The iPhone 6s

It’s been over two weeks since Apple officially took covers off its new iPhone variants for 2015 — the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus. As the norm is, Apple chose to keep several key information regarding the hardware of the new devices a closely guarded secret. This includes the all-important question. How much RAM do the new iPhone models sport?

Well, folks from over at iFixit have posted a teardown of the iPhone 6s which has revealed fascinating details regarding the innards of the device. And yes, as rumored, the new iPhone 6s does get 2GB of RAM, a well-deserved upgrade compared to 1GB on the previous generation iPhones.

The teardown by iFixit has revealed that the iPhone 6s not only has double the amount of RAM, but the RAM type has also been upgraded. While the older iPhones used LPDDR3 RAM, the iPhone 6s uses the new LPDDR4 standard. According to the Verge, this is the first time since the launch of the iPhone 5 that Apple has upgraded the RAM on the iPhone.

The decision by Apple to double the amount of RAM on the new iPhones would be welcomed by both Apple fans and iPhone critics who had a long-standing demand from the company to increase the memory. With faster and double the amount of RAM, the new iPhones would at least on paper be faster than its predecessors. That said, Apple’s highly optimized iOS 9 holds the key, and it would be interesting to see if the hardware-software integration remains as great as older models.

While Apple may have upgraded the RAM on the new iPhone, it still lags behind several new Android phones in this department. Android devices have been getting 2GB of RAM since 2013. In fact, it is now common for several low-end handsets to get 2GB of RAM. Phones like Xiaomi’s Redmi 2 Prime and the Lenovo K3 Note which cost less than $150 all get 2GB RAM. Several new phones including the One Plus 2 and Samsung Note 5 come with 4GB RAM. Even the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge launched earlier this year come with 3GB RAM.

However, Apple is still strong on the CPU front with its new A9 chip being touted to be as powerful, if not more, compared to the latest offerings from Qualcomm, Samsung (Exynos), and MediaTek. In fact, several new benchmark tests have found that the new A9 chip thrashes the newest CPU’s from all these vendors by a fair margin. Coupled this with Apple’s superb hardware-software integration, the overall user experience is still expected to be better than what we get on Android.

Meanwhile, folks from iFixit have also found that the iPhone 6s did get somewhat of a downgrade on the battery front with the capacity going down from 1810 mAh to 1715 mAh. This is perhaps due to the fact that there is less room for the battery inside the unibody shell of the iPhone 6s. Note that Apple had to make space for adding a taptic engine inside the body which powers the new 3D touch feature. However, it is expected that the loss of battery capacity would be offset by better power management by the new processor and iOS 9.

Watch the step-by-step teardown of the iPhone 6s on iFixit here. We have also embedded the video above.

[Images Via iFixit, Apple]