iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max Teardown Shows Signs of Bilateral Wireless Charging Support, Larger Batteries: iFixit

iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max have gone through iFixit's usual teardown treatment and the repair manual website has found the new iPhone model to have some interesting additions over their predecessors. Apple has already confirmed that the iPhone 11 series will offer better battery life than the iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max. However, the teardown of both new phones has revealed the presence of a new board that might be designed to support bilateral aka reverse wireless charging that the company didn't announce despite a number of rumours.

Folks at iFixit live streamed the teardown of the iPhone 11 Pro to quickly showcase its internals. The latest iPhone model, which is the successor to last year's iPhone XS, is found to include a similar L-shaped single-cell battery pack that was a part of the iPhone XS. However, the separate teardown of the iPhone 11 Pro Max also shows a single-cell battery pack that is unlike the iPhone XS Max that had two cells.

Both iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max have two battery connectors. "There could be a number of reasons for this extra cable to exist, but bilateral charging is certainly one of them," the iFixit team notes on its site -- hinting at necessary hardware changes to enable reverse wireless charging.

iPhone 11 Pro Max teardown shows two battery connectors
Photo Credit: iFixit

Apple was initially rumoured to include reverse wireless charging support on the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max, but the company ultimately brought the new models without the feature. It was said that the company ditched the integration at the last minute since the charging efficiency wasn't meeting its requirements. Nevertheless, a recent report did claim that the iPhone 11 models do have the hardware to support reverse wireless charging, but it has been disabled at the current stage.

Apart from reverse wireless charging, Apple might have included the additional connector to power its new system that helps reduce performance impacts as battery ages.

iPhone 11 Pro Max Review

The teardown has also found that thanks to the absence of 3D Touch, Apple has managed to free up some space on the new iPhone models. The 3D Touch technology, which debuted with the iPhone 6s back in 2015, requires a layer under the display panel to sense the pressure of touch inputs.

Additionally, the teardown of the iPhone 11 Pro Max has revealed that there is a 3,969mAh battery that has 15.04Wh power and is 4.6mm thick.

The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max both come with an Apple A13 SoC that is touted to offer significant battery improvements -- alongside various performance improvements.

In addition to the new chipset, the new iPhone models have three rear camera sensors and come with a logic board that has the identical dual-layer design that we saw first on the iPhone X back in 2017. The teardown has also highlighted the existence of an Intel modem instead of a Qualcomm one.

iPhone 11 Pro Max appears to have a dual-layer logic board design
Photo Credit: iFixit

Notably, Apple recently acquired Intel's smartphone modem business division for $1 billion (roughly Rs. 7,093 crores). This makes sense for retaining Intel as the modem maker over moving back to Qualcomm chips.

App developer Steve Troughton-Smith considers that the iPhone 11 Pro models could include a dedicated 2GB RAM chip for their cameras. However, engineers at iFixit weren't able to make any confirmations on that front. It's believed that the dedicated chip might just be an image stabiliser.

The iFixit team has given the iPhone 11 Pro Max a repairability score of 6 out of 10, where 10 is for the devices that are easiest to repair. This is in line with the repairability score given to the iPhone XS models last year.

iPhone 11 or iPhone XR: Which is the best iPhone for India? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.