If iFixit had been around when God created the Earth, then Kyle Wiens and crew would have been up before the first dawn — Torx drivers at the ready — and grabbed the first sunrise as it came over the lip of the virgin Earth. Then they would have opened it up, photographed its nuclear inner-workings, and then waited six billion years or so for someone to invent an internet to post the pictures on.
So it is of course the natural order of things that iFixit should open up the iPad 2 to find out what is inside. Short answer: not much. Long answer: almost nothing but batteries.
Opening the new iPad is a lot trickier than the last one. Where the iPad 1 used Apple’s usual array of clips to hold on the screen assembly, the iPad 2 front-panel is glued on, requiring a heat-gun, some skill and a big pair of balls to remove safely.
Once inside, you see the batteries, which are thinner and wider than before. They hold almost the exact same charge, though: 25 Watt-hours vs. 24.8 Watt-hours of the original. Laid up beside the batteries is the tiny logic board, with Apple’s A5 chip, the touchscreen controller, the Wi-Fi chip (iFixit tore open the Wi-Fi-only model), memory and everything else. The interior of the iPad really is almost nothing but battery.
Arrayed around the edges, and squirreled away into the nooks and crannies of the stiff unibody case are the various camera assemblies, the gyroscope and accelerometer and the volume, mute and power switches. And that’s about it. Sadly, the one thing I really wanted to see isn’t shown, that’s the magnets which are used to hold on the Smart Cover. Perhaps we’ll see these in a repair guide in the future. I’d also like to see the inner-workings of the Smart Cover itself.
Internally as well as externally, then, the iPad 2 is but a small evolution from its predecessor. An that’s no bad thing. As some wags on the Twitter have noted, Apple will likely make more money selling Smart Covers than its rivals will make selling tablets.
iPad 2 Wi-Fi Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Miroslav!]
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