How undignified: The iPad Air 2 — the world’s thinnest tablet! — has only been officially released for a few hours, and already the brutes at iFixit have torn down Apple’s new fondleslab to find out what magical gubbins lie within. Most notably, the teardown reveals that the iPad Air 2 is thinner and lighter than the original Air because… it has a much smaller battery. This explains why the listed battery life for the iPad Air 2 is the same 10 hours as the Air 1 — and why, in practice, some reviews have found that the new Air 2 actually has less battery life than its predecessor. Curiously, the teardown also found that the iPad Air 2 does have an NFC chip — even though reviews of the tablet show that NFC isn’t available.
Just like the original iPad Air, iFixit found that the iPad Air 2 is almost unrepairable, netting a Repairability Score of just 2 out of 10. Like the original iPad Air, the only way into the device is by removing the screen — and there’s so much adhesive that there’s a significant risk of cracking the display while trying to leverage it out. The Lightning connector is still soldered to the logic board, too, meaning it can’t be easily or cheaply replaced — and yes, removing the battery and its oodles of adhesive glue goo still requires a lot of fiddly elbow grease.
Removing the iPad Air 2’s display is hard work. The ‘tube’ thing is heated in the microwave, then used to melt the glue.
Speaking of the battery, the iPad Air 2 now has a 27.62 Wh (watt-hour) battery, as opposed to the 32.9 Wh unit in the original iPad Air — a reduction of about 17%. Amusingly enough, that reduction is almost exactly tied to iPad Air 2’s thickness, which is 18% thinner than the original iPad Air (6.1mm vs. 7.5mm). Apple maintains that the iPad Air 2 is still capable of the same “10 hours of surfing the web on Wi‑Fi, watching video or listening to music,” but some reviews have found that there is indeed a battery life hit. Recode, for example, found that the iPad Air 2 lasted 10 hours and 37 minutes in a battery life benchmark — a full 86 minutes less than the 12 hours and 13 minutes of last year’s iPad Air 1.
Rounding out the rest of the teardown, iFixit found the same NFC module that’s present on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, 2GB of Elpida RAM, and a new 8MP iSight camera that, despite the same name and pixel count as the camera on the iPhone 6 Plus, clearly isn’t the same piece of hardware (which explains why the iPad Air 2 still doens’t take great photos). The WiFi antennas have been moved to the top of the iPad Air 2 (they used to be along the bottom), which should improve reception a bit. The NFC module is a bit weird, considering the iPad Air 2 apparently (according to both reviews and Apple) doesn’t have NFC/contactless payments enabled. Maybe Apple will enable NFC at a later date?
iPad Air 2 logic board. Orange = RAM. Red = the A8X SoC. Green = the NFC module.
A closer look at the iPad Air 2 logic board, showing the A8X SoC
So,
there you have it: If you were wondering how Apple could make a very
thin and light tablet even thinner and lighter, it wasn’t some magical
feat of engineering — they just made the battery thinner. Apple was
obviously hoping to compensate for the smaller battery with the new A8X SoC
— and no doubt some other small system-wide power savings elsewhere —
but seemingly didn’t quite pull it off. It’s worth pointing out that the
iPad Air 2’s 10-hour battery life is still comparable to other flagship
tablets on the market — but it is somewhat ironic that it’s beaten by last year’s model.
As I’ve said before, our shift towards mobile computing is still very much hindered by battery tech;
displays are still doubling in resolution every few years, and chips
are posting huge power reductions year over year, but at least for the
foreseeable future, batteries are moving very slowly. If you want faster smartphones and tablets, and brighter and higher-resolution screens, battery life is going to take a hit — there’s currently no two ways about it, and there probably won’t be for many years to come.
Source: http://www.extremetech.com
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