Kyle Weins Braves iPhone 3GS Lines for iFixit Teardown

by Jordan Yerman | June 19, 2009 at 08:51 am

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Kyle Weins from ifFxit flew to London to be first in line for the brand-new iPhone 3GS... so he could tear it apart for your viewing pleasure. (iPhone 3G S teardown: click for some serious hardware porn) Weins waited in line overnight outside the Regent Street Apple Store, and has torn apart the new toy before you even got up this morning, and iPhone 3GS lines are longer than expected.

People have even been lining up at local Rogers stores here in Vancouver, and other regions are reporting somewhat-unexpected queues for the iPhone 3GS, as Apple expects to sell half a million iPhones this weekend.

Of course, if you're Steve Wozniak, you can just take cuts. One wonders, though, why he didn't already have one, or why he couldn't just have an iPhone 3GS brought to his office. (I'd have said, "No, dude, go to the back of the queue") Apple fanboys, though, seem to be creatures of infinite patience and goodwill. I'm not a fanboy. Anyway, on with the teardown:

According to iFixit, the 3G S teardown is about as easy the 3G, and anyone crazy enough to do so will be able to disassemble theirs with a suction cup, spudger, Philips head screw driver, and a hair dryer.

The hair dryer, by the way, is to melt the glue. I've done this with the old-school iPod Mini, to great success.

The heart of the logic board is the CPU, the Samsung S5PC100 (both previous iPhones used the Samsung S3C6400). It runs at 600MHz, just as T-Mobile let slip last week, but according to Samsung’s spec sheet it can run at up to 833MHz and its native speed is 667MHz. This means that Apple is underclocking, presumably for better battery life.

You can try this at home, if you really, really want to void your warranty.