Apple iPhone 8 Teardown Shows Smaller Battery

Ron Perillo / 7 years ago

The teardown experts at iFixIt are at it again with their latest deep dive into the new Apple iPhone 8. As the name suggests, the iPhone 8 may be a newer model but often times you don’t know what lurks inside until you actually pry it open. That is exactly what the folks at iFixIt have done, disassembling the phone completely and analyzing what they find. Cosmetically, it does not introduce much change over the previous model exept for the glass back.

As suspected, the iPhone 8 camera uses the familiar f/1.8 6-element lens, but everything else about it gets an upgrade. The new model’s sensor is bigger although the specifications still mention 12MP resolution. The physical size has to do more with letting more light in, color improvizing and noise decreasing. Inside, Apple also touts processing software improvement to make the most of the minimal upgrade. X-ray views from iFixIt also reveal four small magnets in the corner. These are most likely for optical image stabilization.

The battery itself is smaller. Fully topped off, the 3.82V 1821 mAh cell delivers 6.96 Wh of power. Unfortunately, this is smaller than the iPhone 7’s 7.45Wh battery. Even the Galaxy S8 packs an 11.55 Wh. However, according to Apple, due to optimizations, battery life performance is more inline with the iPhone 7.

Overall, iFixIt actually gives the iPhone 8 a fair 6 out of 10 in the repairability score. The bulk of the points docked have to do more with the glass back which can be difficult to replace. The most common components remain straightforward. This includes components such as display and the battery, which are the commonly replaced items for repair.