Teardowns of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Reveal Big Battery Difference

By Wilson Rothman

Teardowns of Apple 'sAAPL -0.82% two new smartphones are staring to come out, showing the iPhone 6 has a much smaller battery than the iPhone 6 Plus. That may not come as a surprise to those who read the Journal’s iPhone 6 review, but there are some battery specifics worth pointing out, along with some other mysteries that didn’t surface during the Apple phones’ unveiling.

If you speak battery-ese, these are the specs to note (and even if you don’t, pay attention to the relative differences in the numbers). According to iFixit, the iPhone 6 has a 1810 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery, only slightly larger than the 1560 mAh battery in the  iPhone 5S despite its much larger screen. By comparison, the iPhone 6 Plus has a relatively huge battery—2915 mAh.

Sure, the iPhone 6 Plus needs a hefty battery to power a hefty screen. But even so, our testing confirmed what Apple has said: the iPhone 6 Plus doesn’t just keep pace with the iPhone 6 battery, but actually lasts longer. The iPhone 6′s battery life, meanwhile, isn’t much better than the iPhone 5S’s.

Another big question on people’s minds is how much RAM is in the phones. This is one of those subjective discussions. Android phones tend to have more RAM, but they also tend to need more RAM to run smoothly. iPhones have generally lagged behind. So it doesn’t come as a great surprise that while many Android models now have 2 gigabytes of RAM, both of the new iPhones only have 1 GB—just like their predecessor.

Sticking with 1 GB doesn’t really reveal much about comparative performance—we were satisfied with the operation of the two new phones—but certain apps, games especially, may benefit from additional RAM.

Another buzzing topic is the camera “bump,” which iFixit addressed specifically in its teardown of the iPhone 6 Plus:

It seems that Apple was unable to shave enough thickness off of the camera sensor to keep it flush with the rest of the chassis. The lens cover may be made out of sapphire glass, but we’re still concerned about what this design choice might mean for durability.

These folks are experts in repair, so that’s certainly something to pay attention to, though the models we tested felt sturdy enough. If you’re worried, many cases are already selling—including sleek ones from Apple and rugged ones from Otter—that’ll hide the bump.

The team at iFixit.com did manage to isolate the differentiating element between the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus: an optical image stabilizer, which it describes as a “tiny metal cage, nudged to and fro by the electromagnetic coils surrounding the sensor.” You can see it here:

                        

Culled from: wsj.com