On the outside, the iPhone 6 Plus looks like a scaled-up iPhone 6. But, the internal hardware tells a slightly different story.
As I'll show you today, the phones are very similar, but far from identical.
I'm Bill Detwiler, and this is Cracking Open.
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As Apple will tell you, the iPhone 6 Plus is big.
It's noticeably larger than the regular iPhone 6 and in my opinion, its 5.5 inch screen puts it very close to phablet territory.
Now luckily, cracking open the 6 plus is identical to opening the regular 6 which means it's easier to open than previous iPhones.
Now you'll still need to remove the two pentelobe screws along the bottom edge with a special screwdriver.
But Apple relocated the ribbon cable on the home button.
Which means you no longer need to worry about tearing it when popping open the front panel.
Now, with the front panel open, the first thing we're going to do is remove several metal plates, which cover connectors for the battery, front panel, and other components.
Then, we'll disconnect the battery and remove the front panel.
The overall hardware layout is the same as on the regular iPhone 6. There's a speaker and lightning connector assembly at the bottom.
Battery along the left side, motherboard along the right and the camera assembly at the top.
Now, attached to the front panel are the display.
Front camera and sensors.
Earpiece speaker, and the home button.
Now there's also a new metal plate that sits behind the screen.
While I would usually begin our teardown by removing the battery, I'm gonna leave it in place as I remove the other components.
Not this will keep you from having to glue it back in later on.
So the first piece to come out is the new rear facing camera.
It has the same 8 megapixel count as the camera in the regular iPhone 6, but it also has optical image stabilization.
The vibration mechanism comes out next.
And after removing a few screws and standoffs and detaching the remaining connectors, we can lift out the logic board.
Now unfortunately, the shield to cover the six plus' logic board are soldered in place, obscuring our view of the new eight eight processor in a motion tracking chip and NFC chip.
As I want to put this phone back together in working order, I'm going to leave the shields in place.
So the last piece to come out is the speaker assembly.
Still attached to the case are the headphone and lightening connector assembly, volume buttons, ringer switch, power button, a small antenna, and a slew of ribbon cables.
Now most of these components are held in the case with both screws and adhesive.
If any of these pieces were damaged, removing and replacing them wouldn't be too difficult, but I don't want to risk damaging them during removal.
So, I'm going to leave them where they are.
Now as I said at the beginning, although the iPhone 6 Plus may look like an oversized 6.
There are some significant differences inside the case.
Now first off, the overall layout is very similar but not identical.
For example, the vibration mechanisms are different and are located in different spots.
Likewise, the external speakers are different.
Now the Plus's 11.1 watt hour battery is also much larger than the regular 6's 6.91 watt hour unit.
And the logic boards are different.
As with the regular iPhone 6 if you only looked at the 6 plus on the outside you'd miss some really interesting and important design changes that lurk inside the phone.
Now for a complete list of specs, pricing and real world tests.
Check out Tim Steven's full Cnet review.
And to see more tear down photos and read my full hardware analysis, go to www.techrepublic.com/crackingopen.
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