iFixit has posted its teardown of Apple’s iPad Pro, revealing some interesting insights into the approach that Apple took when designing its new larger tablet. The teardown notes that the logic board has been relocated to the center of the unit, and while the battery takes up a substantial amount of space in smaller iPad models, the iPad Pro leaves a significant amount of space for speaker enclosures — about half as much space as the battery — to support its new four-speaker self-balancing audio system. Apple clearly made some tradeoffs here in balancing battery capacity, weight, and sound quality. A look at the speaker design revealed a driver and caped resonance chamber, with back volume chambers machined directly into the iPad Pro enclosure, with foam filling that is likely used to amplify the speaker volume. Apple has made claims that this new design will provide up to three times more audio output than prior iPad models.
The teardown also revealed that the new iPad Pro uses many of the same components found in the iPad Air 2, including the same front and rear facing camera hardware, ambient light sensors on the 3.5mm headphone jack, and MIMO technology in the Pro’s antennas providing 866 Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds and 150 Mbps LTE support. The teardown also reveals the internal 3.77V battery is labeled with 10307 mAh of capacity, bringing it to 38.8 Wh — a 40 percent increase over the iPad Air 2. Drawing comparisons to Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 tablet, iFixit notes that the iPad Pro has a slightly larger display at 12.9” but despite this, it comes in at about 2.5 ounces lighter and 1.55 mm thinner than the Surface Pro 4.
The teardown also notes some of the chips used by the various iPad Pro components, including display controllers by Broadcom, NXP Semiconductors, and Texas Instruments, as well as a Parade Technologies DP695 Timing Controller based on the one used in Apple’s iMac Retina 5K. The logic board of course includes Apple’s A9X 64-bit processor along with 4GB RAM by SK Hynix, a Toshiba 32GB NAND flash memory chip, Invensense gyroscope and accelerometer combo, and an additional selection of NFC, audio, and communications controller chips by NXP, Apple, Fresco, Universal Scientific Industrial, Maxim Integrated, and Fairchild Semiconductor.