Remember when I said that this year, the iFixit was overcome by a Vietnamese channel in dismantling the new iPhones? Well, the repair firm didn't make a plea: instead of performing the teardowns in the traditional way, team members decided to make it even more dramatic and open the iPhone 11 Pro Live in front of the camera.
The “common” iPhone 11 Pro teardown was done earlier today and can now be viewed on YouTube; now the firm is dissecting the iPhone 11 Pro Max not in front of the cameras, but still updating the live findings on the device page.
Overall, iFixit didn't even notice big news about the Vietnamese video except on one point: the firm found evidence that the new iPhones did indeed have the hardware needed for the bilateral loading (that feature that lets you not only charge your smartphone but charge other devices like AirPods).
The evidence is in two connectors that connect the logic board battery. When disconnecting one of them, the team realized that the iPhone was still on, but started charging only through the Lightning port, and no longer by contact ie at least apparently this second connector solely responsible for connecting the card to the wireless charging module. .
As the team writes:
With the power on, we disconnected the connector on the bottom of the battery and the iPhone kept on charging by the Lightning port but not by charging wireless. Apparently this additional connector represents a direct connection to the wireless charging coil, which would be an important feature for bilateral charging.
Also, when we plugged in the connector again, iPhone temporarily displayed a temperature alert before returning to normal. We suspect he has lost contact with one of the battery temperature sensors and has shut down; This sounds a lot like a heat management feature generated by reverse charging.
If you are following the soap opera, iPhones 11 Pro were introduced without support for the bilateral charging feature, even after months of rumors that the devices would bring this option. A few days after the announcement, however, the leaker Sonny Dickson stated that iPhones would indeed have hardware for the functionality and that Apple had disabled it for the software for some mysterious reason. Now iFixit corroborates this hypothesis in practice.
Thus, it seems that the right guess was that of Ming-Chi Kuo, a few days before the launch of the new handsets: according to him, Apple had canceled last minute bilateral loading because the efficiency of the feature "could not meet the requirements" from the company. As the parts to implement it were already in iPhones, the way was to disable everything via software.
Obviously, given the assumption that bilateral charging on iPhones posed a risk to devices (and consumers), it is far better that Apple canceled the appeal than forced it out and then had to remedy the problem. Still, if the hypothesis is proven, we will have yet another mark on the complicated history that Ma is drawing on wireless charging technologies.
What do you guys think?
via iMore
Update by Rafael Fischmann 9/22/2019 6:40 PM
Rene Ritchie, editor of iMore, posted one tweet subsequent claiming to have heard something contrary to what iFixit pointed out:
Update: Its my understanding bilateral inductive charging wasnt pulled from the iPhones 11.
It was never slated for production and there is nothing in there that could be enabled later.
(It would also be dumb to ship it without Watch support…) https://t.co/vXQxM4T3Yf
– Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) September 21, 2019
Update: From my understanding that bilateral induction recharging has not been removed from iPhones 11.It was never targeted production and there is nothing inside that could be later activated. (It would also be silly to release this without Watch support)
Well If there is even something inside that can be enabled, it is not too much for anyone to do it via jailbreak. The right time
