Teardown reveals iPhone Xs and Xs Max have a new power chip designed by Apple, extra antenna band

“Last year’s iPhone X had a weird name and the most advanced internals we’d ever seen in a teardown,” iFixit reports. “This year Apple turns it up to eleven with the bafflingly-named iPhone XS and XS Max.”

“We notice an extra antenna band has moved in where our left-side mic-hole friends used to live. Rumor has it this is for ‘Gigabit LTE,’ and it seems to make a difference,” iFixit reports. “Though we feared Apple might pile on more adhesive to achieve that new IP68 rating, we fared no worse opening these phones than we did with ye olde IP67-rated predecessors.”

“Time to talk cameras! The S-year often comes with a camera upgrade, and Apple had a lot to say about these new sensors. The wide-angle sensor size has been increased by 32%.
Pixel size has also been bumped, bringing better low-light performance and contributing to the new ‘Smart HDR’ feature,” iFixit reports. “There was one thing Apple forgot to mention about the new camera: all that 32% had to go somewhere, and it turns out the camera bump had to grow a little — your iPhone X case may not fit your iPhone XS.”

“The XS packs a 10.13 Wh battery (2,659 mAh at 3.81 V), weighing 39.5 g—slightly downgraded from last year’s X. But this decrease in capacity comes with a wild new battery configuration. Rather than using two cells to fill this L-shaped recess, Apple has constructed an all-new single-cell battery,” iFixit reports. “The XS Max battery unsurprisingly comes out on top capacity-wise, with 12.08 Wh (3,179 mAh at 3.80 V), and weighing 46.6 g. No single-cell here, though!”

“We suspect this marks the beginning of a new era in iPhone battery design—the carefully contoured single-cell concept is limited to the smaller XS for now,” iFixit reports, “but we expect to see it again soon. iPhone XR, perhaps?”

Read more and see all of the gory dissection photos in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Here’s hoping our favorite iPhone X case still fits for the Xs owner to whom we’re planning to give it, the Spigen Classic One [10th Anniversary Limited Edition] iPhone X Case.