Hack

Apple’s iPhone
An inside look at a sensation B Communications Center
The chips that make the iPhone a phone “seem to be
By Daniel Turner
pretty standard,” says Kyle Wiens of iFixit, an online
Apple parts retailer. Portelligent’s Howard Curtis agrees:
“They’re plain vanilla.” A standard Infineon Technologies
pple’s latest offering proves that revolu-

A tionary tech products don’t have to be that

revolutionary. Upon the iPhone’s release,
enthusiasts around the world rushed to tear it apart,
eager to see something new. Instead, they found that
Apple had relied mostly on tried-and-true compo-
nents—with one big exception: a truly stunning multi-
touch screen that allows users to manipulate data and
images in entirely unprecedented ways.
processor supplies the EDGE wireless-data capabilities
and supports the camera and the movie playback sys-
tem. There’s also a transceiver for quad-band GSM con-
nectivity. Marvell’s chip is accompanied by a Cambridge
Silicon Radio chip that offers Bluetooth 2.0. Critics scorn
the iPhone for not working with AT&T’s 3G network,
but Apple has said that incorporating 3G hardware
would add heat and reduce battery life. Wiens says the
real issue is that 3G “is practically nonexistent outside
large cities.” Still, he adds, Apple will need to address
this issue if it wants to sell the iPhone in Europe.

A Two Boards
One of the iPhone’s two circuit boards includes the CPU,
the flash memory, and other system memory chips that
allow the phone to run its stripped-down version of Apple’s
OS X operating system and serve as a media device.
The other board hosts the elements that enable com-
munications: chips from Infineon that provide connec-
tivity over GSM (global system for mobile) and EDGE
(enhanced data rates for GSM evolution) mobile-phone
networks, as well as an 802.11b/g chip from Marvell.
Howard Curtis, the VP of global services at Portelligent,
which analyzes electronic products, says this design
leaves Apple with options. “You could isolate changes to
one board and swap it out,” he says—say, to provide sup-
port for CDMA, another popular mobile-phone standard.

Accelerometers
Like Nintendo’s Wii game console
(see Hack, July/August 2007), the
iPhone uses miniaturized accelerome-
ters that measure its movement. These
sensors detect whether the user is
holding the iPhone in its “portrait” or
“landscape” orientation; the operating
system rotates the display accordingly.

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 Hack
C NAND Flash Memory
The iPhone comes in two mod-
els, the only difference being
storage capacity: one has four
gigabytes, the other eight. Both
use flash memory chips from
Samsung that are “very, very
similar to, if not the same as, the Multitouch Display
ones in iPods,” says Kyle Wiens. Apple has had problems with the plastic screens on its
iPods, which tend to show scratches, but the iPhone’s
C
screen is made of optical-quality glass. That’s all the
more critical because the screen is the interface. Instead
of buttons or a keyboard, the iPhone uses a combina-
tion of new software and a unique multitouch screen
manufactured by the German company Balda. Users
tap “soft” buttons directly on the screen and zoom
A in or out of images or Web pages with two-fingered
D
gestures (zoom out is a pinch, zoom in is a spread).
This new control scheme abandons the WiMP (win-
dow, icon, menu, pointer) system that has dominated
graphical interfaces on computers for decades.

B
D CPU
The phone’s brain is a custom-for-Apple
CPU built by Samsung and based on a
32-bit, 620-megahertz core from ARM,
which makes dedicated systems for use
in cars, handheld games, smart cards,
and other applications where power is
at a premium. Howard Curtis says that
working with ARM, a company promi-
nent in the “embedded” market, could be
significant for Apple. “OS X is now in the
embedded space,” he says, even as Micro-
E soft keeps trying to build a desirable ver-
sion of Windows for the same market.

E Battery
Though the iPhone’s lithium-ion battery is nothing
new technically—“it’s just like the battery in an iPod,
but big, very big,” says Wiens—it has gotten a lot of
attention. That’s because unlike the batteries in other
cell phones, the iPhone’s is soldered on and not
(easily) replaceable by the user. (Apple will change
a dead battery for $79 plus shipping.) At least one
consumer has filed suit against Apple for its bat-
C H R I STO P H E R HARTI N G

tery policy. Apple executives say that even after 400

complete depletion-and-recharge cycles, the battery
will retain 80 percent of its charge capacity, which
should be good for well over six hours of talk time.

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