Apple iPhone Guts

Curious about what's inside an iPhone? Well, the good folks at Audio Design Line (via EE Times) have a teardown.

Mind you, it's not like the old days when you could just pop off the cover of your new electronic doohickey and look at the manufacturer's part numbers on the chips. These are the days of self-branded ICs. So what did the folks at the technology evaluation/investigation company Semiconductor Insights do?

To get inside the chips, SI resorted to decapping, a process that involves immersing the chips in acid to dissolve the outer packaging and then manually scraping away any residual packaging material.

Sounds like fun! Check out the video of SI's teardown:

I must admit that I had a little sinking feeling after reading this:

Despite the phone's "external simplicity and serene look and feel, the internal implementation is actually quite complex," he said. "There are many secondary operations, fastener screws and difficult orientations needed for final assembly, making the manufacture of the iPhone in China a near-must."

Not only can't we afford to make socks in the US anymore, it seems we can't afford to make almost anything that isn't prohibitively expensive to ship.