Teardown reveals iPhone XS has a notched L-shaped battery, iPhone XS Max has an extended logic board with an Apple-designed power management chip
Tools Featured in this Teardown … Introduction — Last year's iPhone X had a weird name and the most advanced internals we'd ever seen in a teardown.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the fourth straight fall iFixit has opened a new iPhone on launch weekend, and the lineage is legible in the parts: the iPhone X teardown found an L-shaped dual-cell battery and a stacked logic board, and the XS carries both ideas forward — the notched cell shape persists while the board grows to fill the XS Max chassis.
The genuinely new finding is silicon, not geometry: an Apple-designed power management chip on the XS Max's extended logic board, continuing the in-house-design pattern earlier teardowns documented in displays, haptics, and modems going back to the iPhone 7 split between Intel and other modem suppliers and the iPhone 6s's smaller battery paired with 3D Touch.
First-order effects
- Repair shops and DIY fixers face a harder battery swap than in the rectangular-cell era: the notched L-shaped pack inherited from the iPhone X complicates removal and replacement compared with the simple cells in the iPhone 7 and 6s teardowns.
- Whichever merchant supplier previously won the iPhone's power-management socket loses the XS Max design outright to Apple's own chip.
Second-order effects
- Third-party repair pricing for XS-generation battery service trends upward relative to older iPhones, because shaped multi-cell packs raise part and labor costs versus the flat cells iFixit documented in 2015–2016 models.
- Other analog and power-chip vendors selling into the iPhone now face the same squeeze Qualcomm-style captive design brings: each function Apple pulls in-house removes one external socket from future boards.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across future generations, iPhone internals consolidate around fully custom Apple silicon and space-optimized assemblies, making official-channel repair and component sourcing progressively more central as independent options thin out.
The trend: Annual iPhone teardowns since 2015 trace a steady trade of repairability for density, as Apple replaces merchant components with in-house designs and shapes batteries and boards to fill every millimeter of the chassis.