I built a like-new(but really refurbished) iPhone 6S 16GB entirely from parts I bought in the public cell phone parts markets in Huaqiangbei. And it works!

Making a CUSTOM iPhone – in Shenzhen, China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQszF2iKhx0

Enough of these boring looking iPhones – let’s make a custom Strange Parts iPhone here in Shenzhen, China. I headed out to the cell phone parts markets in Huaqiangbei, to find a custom iPhone back. I then headed off to the laser engraving booths to have them etch a custom design in the iphone back. I think it came out pretty well!

How I Upgraded My iPhone Memory 800% – in Shenzhen, China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHP-OPXK2ig

[Scotty Allen] from Strange Parts, has just concluded a three month journey of what clearly is one of the most interesting Shenzhen market projects we have seen in a while. We have all heard amazing tales, pertaining the versatility of these Chinese markets and the multitude of parts, tools and expertise available at your disposal. But how far can you really go and what’s the most outrageous project can you complete if you so wished? To answer this question, [Scotty] decided to source and assemble his own Iphone 6S, right down to the component level!

How I Made My Own iPhone – in China!
https://strangeparts.com/how-i-made-my-own-iphone-in-china/

You think you’re good at soldering? Can you solder a CPU? A CPU inside an iPhone? A decapped CPU inside an iPhone? Can you solder inside a decapped CPU inside of an iPhone?

Repair iphone6 plus CPU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nap0gtds5tQ

Ever so slowly, the main storage in our computers has been moving from spinning disks, to SSDs over SATA, to Flash drives connected to a PCI something or other. The lastest technology is NVMe — Non-Volitile Memory Express — a horribly named technology that puts a memory controller right on the chip. Intel has a PCI-based NVMe drive out, Samsung recently released an M.2 NVMe drive, and the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus are built around this storage technology.

New chips demand a reverse engineering session, and that’s exactly what [Ramtin Amin] did. He took a few of these chips out of an iPhone, created a board that will read them, and managed to analize the firmware.

Demystifying the i-Device NVMe NAND
(New storage used by Apple)
http://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmepcie

I don’t know about you, but the recent controversy regarding the Apple A9 SoC inside the company’s latest iPhone 6s and 6s Plus smartphones was fascinating to me. Here’s a brief summary, in case you didn’t catch the October 2015 kerfuffle. The application processor is dual-foundry-fabricated, from both Samsung and TSMC (the A9X derivative found in the iPad Pro does not, at least yet, seem to be similarly split-sourced). Quoting from Wikipedia:

The Samsung version is called APL0898, which is manufactured on a 14 nm FinFET process and is 96 mm2 large, while the TSMC version is called APL1022, which is manufactured on a 16 nm FinFET process and is 104.5 mm2 large.

To wit, when running Geekbench, a well-known and CPU-intensive benchmark utility, a TSMC A9-based iPhone 6s delivered roughly 33% longer battery life than the Samsung-fabricated alternative (~8 versus ~6 hours), as well as delivering slightly higher performance.

Various techniques are available to tell you which version of the A9 is in your smartphone. And predictably, TSMC-based variants are being explicitly identified (and resold for a premium) on Ebay and elsewhere

Indeed, a short time after news of the SoC issue broke, Apple issued a rare response to “Chipgate”, claiming (and backed up by independent testing) that in normal usage, the battery life discrepancy was only a few percentage points’ difference.

Is this controversy an isolated incident in tech? History suggests it’s not. Looking only at Apple, I came across plenty of other examples, such as:

Antennagate: the iPhone 4 antenna design led to transmission-and-reception degradation when the smartphone was held in certain ways, and
Bendgate: the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were susceptible to bending when pressure was applied to the chassis (such as when putting it into a rear pocket and then sitting down)

Smartphones are the opium of the people. If you need proof, just watch the average person’s reaction when they break “their precious”. Repairing smartphones has become a huge business. The most often broken item on phones is of course the front glass. In most cases, the screen itself doesn’t break. On newer smartphones, even the touchscreen is safe. The front glass is only a protective lens.

The easiest way to repair a broken front glass is to swap the entire LCD assembly. For an iPhone 6 plus, this will run upwards of $120 USD. However, the glass lens alone is just $10. The problem is that the LCD, digitizer and front glass are a laminated package. Removing them without breaking the wafer thin LCD glass requires great care. T

The hardest part is breaking down the optical glue securing the glass to the LCD. In the past that has been done with heat. More recently, companies from China have been selling liquid-nitrogen-based machines that cool the assembly.

[JerryRigEverything] doesn’t have several thousand dollars for a liquid nitrogen machine, but he does have a $5 block of dry ice.

fter laying the phone screens down on the ice for a few minutes, [Jerry] was able to chip away the glass. It definitely takes more work than the nitrogen method.

Apple is known about the iPhone smartphone margin has been squeezed very high. However, the reforms made ​​by the Group affect the cost of the equipment. IHS estimates that the iPhone 6s Plus model components cost $ 16 more than its predecessor, namely the iPhone 6 Plus.

IHS’s analysis suggests that the iPhone 6s Plus’s components cost $ 231.50. The assembly and testing costs $ 4.50 device, so Apple’s total expenses are $ 236 each.

Apple’s profit margins are still in place, because without cell phone operator compensation iPhone 6s Plus the price is 16 GB of memory for $ 749.

new iPhone manufacturing and material costs have been kept very reasonable.
5.5-inch screen is still the most expensive part of the machine at $ 52.50 price

Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3394:uusin-iphone-on-kalliimpi-valmistaa&catid=13&Itemid=101

It costs Apple an estimated $236 to make and assemble its new iPhone 6s Plus, roughly one-third the $749 retail price of the smartphone, according to a teardown analysis by IHS Technology.

The research firm pulled apart Apple’s newest device to get a closer look at its components and analyze the likely cost of materials and manufacturing, drawing from its knowledge of the electronic component industry.

Though IHS did not have time to conduct a similar teardown of the iPhone 6s, it estimates the cost of materials to be $211.50 — roughly $20 less than the bigger iPhone 6s Plus.

Rassweiler said Apple’s decision to offer an enhanced, 12-megapixel camera serves two purposes — it differentiates the “s” generation of iPhones from last year’s model, with its 8-megapixel camera. But the larger images also push consumers to buy smartphones with more memory — and that’s pure profit for Apple.

IHS estimates that flash memory is incredibly cheap — about 35 cents a gigabyte. So coaxing consumers to upgrade from, say, a smartphone with 16 gigabytes of memory to 64 gigs costs Apple about $17 more in component costs. But at retail, consumers pay an additional $100 for the extra storage — a tidy windfall.