iPhone 7 teardowns: Big Taptic Engine, Intel modems, waterproofing, and more

It's iPhone release day, and while people around the world wait impatiently by their windows for the delivery truck or in line at Apple Stores, the iPhone teardown cottage industry has been ripping the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus apart to see how they tick.

iFixit's is still the teardown of record, though as of this writing it has only torn down the larger of the two phones. The write-up focuses in part on the stuff that Apple is doing with the space freed up by killing the headphone jack. A bigger battery is part of that—the 2900mAh, 11.1wHr battery in the 7 Plus is a step up from the 2750mAh battery in the 6S Plus, though still not quite as large as the 2915mAh battery in the old 6 Plus. Chipworks' teardown notes that the standard iPhone 7 battery is now 1960mAh, a step up from the 1810mAh in the iPhone 6 and the 1715mAh battery in the 6S.

A lot of that space goes to the new Taptic Engine, too, which is several times larger than the version in the iPhone 6S Plus. Apple says the larger Taptic Engine is more precise, something necessary both to make the solid-state home button feel like a physical button and to enable the haptic feedback API supported on both iPhones 7. And some of it is taken up by a plastic bumper "that seems to channel sound from outside the phone into the microphone."