iPhone 6s teardown reveals smaller 1715 mAh battery, 3D Touch display, x-ray view of Taptic Engine
iPhone 6s Teardown — Teardown — Teardowns provide a look inside a device and should not be used as disassembly instructions. — In Progress — This guide is a work in progress.
Context & Ripple Effects
iFixit's launch-week teardown of the iPhone 6s shows where Apple spent the internal budget of its flagship: a 3D Touch display assembly adds hardware layers the prior model lacked, and the bill comes due in capacity, with the pack coming out at 1715 mAh — smaller than its predecessor's. The x-ray view of the Taptic Engine matters because haptics becomes a recurring character in this series of teardowns.
The arc runs forward from here: within a year, the iPhone 7 Plus teardown documents a bigger Taptic Engine occupying the space freed by the removed headphone jack, and by 2017–2018 Apple is reshaping batteries entirely — the iPhone X gets an L-shaped dual-cell pack around its stacked logic board, and the iPhone XS teardown pairs notched L-shaped cells with an extended logic board carrying an Apple-designed power management chip.
First-order effects
- iPhone 6s buyers get new pressure-sensitive 3D Touch input and refined haptics at the cost of a smaller 1715 mAh battery than the previous model carried.
Second-order effects
- Apple's own next moves confirm the trade-off was temporary rather than accepted: the Taptic Engine grows into reclaimed space once the headphone jack goes, and battery geometry is rethought with the L-shaped packs in the iPhone X and XS rather than capacity staying flat.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, iPhone internal design consolidates around Apple-authored components end to end — shaped batteries, stacked boards, custom power management silicon — so each generation's teardown reads less like off-the-shelf parts and more like a single integrated system.
The trend: iPhone teardowns trace Apple trading battery capacity for new interaction hardware in the short term, then reclaiming the loss through aggressive internal redesign and increasingly custom components.