Washington: Apple’s latest iPhones use components made by Intel, Micron Technology, and Toshiba, among others, according to two firms that cracked open iPhone Xs and Xs Max models.
The studies by repair firm iFixit, published this week, are among the first detailed teardowns of the phones, which became available for purchase in stores around the world yesterday.
Supplying parts for Apple’s iPhones is considered a coup for chipmakers and other manufacturers. While Apple publishes a broad list of suppliers each year, it does not disclose which companies make which components and insists its suppliers keep quiet.
That makes teardowns the only way of establishing the breakdown of parts in the phones, although analysts also recommend caution in drawing conclusions because Apple sometimes uses more than one supplier for a part. What is found in one iPhone may not be found in others. The breakdowns listed no parts from Samsung and no chips from Qualcomm.
Samsung in the past has supplied memory chips for Apple’s iPhones and was believed by analysts to be the sole supplier of the costly displays for last year’s iPhone X.
The iFixit teardown showed iPhone Xs and Xs Max used Intel’s modem and communication chips instead of Qualcomm’s hardware.
The latest iPhones also had DRAM and NAND memory chips from Micron and Toshiba, according to iFixit’s study. Previous teardowns of the iPhone 7 had shown DRAM chips made by Samsung in some models.
TechInsights’ dissection of a 256GB storage capacity iPhone Xs Max, on the other hand, revealed DRAM from Micron but NAND memory from SanDisk, which is owned by Western Digital and works with Toshiba for its supply of NAND chips.