Teardown of iPhone XS reveals new, L-shaped battery

Now that Apple’s iPhone XS and XS Max are available for purchase, they’ve already been dropped, drowned, and of course — torn down. 

The teardown experts at iFixit have disassembled the iPhone XS and its bigger sibling, the iPhone XS Max, in one go. And though the phones’ internals are similar to the guts of last year’s iPhone X, the teardown does reveal a few interesting new details.

Remember that odd, L-shaped, two-part battery from the iPhone X? In the iPhone XS, it’s still L-shaped, but it’s now a single, unbroken part. This didn’t help capacity much, as the iPhone XS’ battery capacity lags behind the iPhone X by a few milliamp-hours (mAh), and the teardown reveals why: The single-part battery has a notch of sorts, which — according to this 2016 Apple patent — serves as a “relief zone” that reduces stress on the battery. In any case, it’s much cooler-looking and will hopefully enable Apple to do even more complex, space-saving battery designs in the future. 

Interestingly, the L-shaped battery inside the iPhone XS Max is still made out of two parts (see both batteries below). 

Another detail that may have eluded you is that the iPhone XS’s camera bump is slightly bigger than the camera bump on the iPhone X. That means not every iPhone X case will fit your iPhone XS, if you decide to upgrade. 

As far as repairability goes, the iPhone XS and XS Max got a very decent score of 6 out of 10. According to iFixit, both the display and the battery can be repaired/replaced in many cases. However, if your back glass breaks, the phone’s entire chassis must be replaced, which will be very tough to do for non-professionals.