Friday, March 16, 2012

New iPad Teardown: 'It's Really Just a Giant Battery'

You may be busy preparing your line-waiting strategy for a new iPad on Friday morning, or plotting the fastest route to your local Wal-Mart to pick up a new iPad at midnight.
But the guys at iFixIt have trumped us all — by flying to Australia, where the tablet is already on sale, and proceeding to tear one apart.
iFixIt’s CXO Luke Soules was first in line to pick up the new iPad at the Telstra store in Melbourne, Australia.

He promptly took the device apart to find out what’s inside, with the help of heat, plastic guitar picks, and a plastic opening tool.
Curious about what’s going on under the hood?

Battery


The battery is perhaps the most notable thing Soules found in the teardown. The new iPad rocks a 42.5 watt-hour battery, a dramatic increase over the iPad 2′s 25-watt-hour power provider. The iPad is going to need all that power to truck along on 4G and support the extra RAM and improved graphics in the tablet, and battery life is still rated at right around the same amount as its predecessor.
“Its 3.7 volts and estimated 10 hours of use (9 with cellular data network) are comparable to that of the iPad 2, but we assume the extra 17.5 watt-hours are put to good use powering the extra RAM and greatly improved GPU,” says Soules. “As is the case with most tablets, the iPad 3 is really just a giant battery.”

Processor


The new iPad comes rocking a A5X processor manufactured by Samsung. “Like the A5, the A5X system features a 1GHz dual-core CPU. The upgrade that earns it an ‘X’ is the new GPU, which Apple claims outperforms even Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processor.” notes Soules.

Screen


The newest iPad’s screen is what has many clamoring to get their hands on one, and iFix it echoed some of the same points early reviews have made about the screen. “Even turned off, the 2048×1536 pixel ‘Retina display’ seems to radiate with colors one could not begin to imagine,” Soules said during the site’s live teardown of the tablet. The model numbers on iFixit’s iPad make Soules believe that the screen — at least on its model — was made by Samsung.

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