Apple Watch Series 3 Teardown and Comparison! (GPS vs LTE) By iFixit

Hey everyone I'm Kelsey, and this is Alex. We just finished our Apple Watch, Series three teardown, so I've had Alex come in because he's our in-house Apple Watch expert. How many Apple watches have you taken apart at this point, I've probably gone into around 250 to 300 Apple watches, either for tearing apart for parts or just for repairs for friends. So I've really had a chance to do the deep dive on these and see what's inside, what can we expect as far as the opening procedure? Is it any different from the previous model compared to now? It's? No, it's barely any different. Really everything inside is basically the same. The only differences are the antenna got much larger, especially in the cellular version, and the touch gasket has a slightly different positioning for the connector, so I'm actually going to switch where I'm going to go in with my blade so that I'm less in the way of all of those delicate little things.

So what tools do we need to get started? So my primary tool is going to be the reflow station because there's a lot of adhesive around the touch, cascade and I really want to get that softened up, but I also don't want to get it so hot that I burn out the LCD or damaged anything inside. So my reflow station allows me to go very specific on the heat and the depth, and then I'm just going to go at it with my exact knife and pry it open. Sorry, let's go for it all right. So now that we have a cracked open, I can work the rest of my way around and get the adhesive off all right. So the next step is to release, as if connectors they have this little adhesive strip covering all three of them, so I'm going to carefully remove that.

So I can see all of my connections, one two and three all right. So, let's take a second to compare cellular versus non-cellular screen. Anything doesn't really look like no, it looks like it's probably going to be pretty interchangeable. The cables look like then same place. All the chips are tucked in the same place and all the connections are the same so as far as we know, they're- probably interchangeable.

So, while the displays looked similar, the insides you said, are a little different. What do you notice as far as differences between the cellular and on cellular? The primary difference that we see is the one that we expect is gonna, be the difference in the antenna, but you definitely see that the LTE antenna that I'm pulling above the GPS version is much larger and goes around the side, whereas this is the size that we're much more used to and is in the two previous series, and now that we have the display off, we have a lot of traveling screws to remove, so I'm going to get going on that. Let's liberate this battery that was glued in place and compare it to the one that we removed from the LT earlier. Okay, what did we see only a slight difference between the two yeah? It looks like there's a nominal change in capacity. It's really not going to be very noticeable, but it does seem to be enough to warrant so an Apple number in both the Apple Watch and the iPhone 8.

Furthermore, it wasn't so much a larger battery as more efficient processing. So while the battery might not be larger, we're hoping that there is still going to be much better battery life, even though there is a higher demand for energy due to the more cellular activity. Now that we have the battery out, I'm going to go ahead and remove this force hash gasket. So that's this connection fear I'm going to remove I'm going to reach under it and slide it all. The way around the LTE seems to have two one connection and one chip I'm, not sure what that chip is, but I'm sure our fantastic team will tell us after the fact.

Well, this one only has the touch sensor. This might be more connection for the antenna, because it's more out of the frame, but more news on that later. Alright, now that we have all the sensitive stuff out, I'm just gonna start removing some of these screws in the other watch, we had 17 screws, so we're just going to fast-forward through most of these all right, I now at the last screw, since we wanted to liberate the flywheel bracket, and we get to tear everything apart and see what we can actually remove. So this allows us to lift the tactic engine and get a look underneath, and it looks like this antenna is going to be pretty easily removable, so I'm going to go ahead and snap that off put it to the side, I'm going to go around to the side, and I'm going to go ahead and remove this button, which is gonna, fall right out for us next, we can go ahead and remove this. That's the tactic engine, and we get to see more of what's underneath and making this anymore.

So we're kind of at the last point before destruction could occur in the teardown and there seems to be a lot of differences so far, which we weren't expecting at all very cool but share it with us. What do you? What do you see as you're, going through the ?, so the most exciting thing for me was I was expecting just a change in the antenna because that's really where the differences are, but with that change in antenna, there's a large change in chipset there's at least six exposed chips on the LTE version that we don't see in the normal GPS version? So that's very interesting to me and because of that, there's also going to be some design changes where there's some foam to make up for the lack of chips and connectors on the LTE lots of screws. Lots of food is actually, so there's 17 in the LTE and 19 in the other version. So it's really a massive amount of screws and brackets and everything that you have to get out of there, which makes getting anything past the battery really difficult to get to I'm, not gonna, be really consistent for repair. Okay, now that we have removed absolutely everything from the top plate and compared the two I'm gonna actually be able to remove the plate from the non LTE version, because the LTE version is soldered to the case.

So I don't want to destroy that one, but we should be able to take a peek right behind this one and see a very similar Surgeon assembly to the previous series. Although the connection does seem more removable, which is a very nice thing to see alright so with the GPS version taken all the way apart, we noticed some differences. What was the most surprising to you? I think. The biggest surprise for me was really the topic engine. There were some things that we expect it to be different.

There was that much larger antenna and the chipset to support that those are things that we expected going in, but the topic engine ends up having a different type of connection to make up for that change in space and that chipset, so I think it's fascinating that they redesigned part of to make up for that, rather than the extra foam that they added. In other places, and then what about repairability, so we gave the LTE version to six out of ten. Did the differences impact repair ability for the GPS I? Think I would keep the score the same, and there are some changes deeper down, but I think that the there's huge three big things that we want to repair in this watch. It's going to be the display, the touch gasket and the battery, and those things are still going to be just as accessible and just as repairable. The display is the point of ingress.

So that's the first thing you want to remove, and I did the battery or the gasket our potential next steps, so I would keep it at six and then, after that, though, it gets pretty after that doc, because there's a deal them get to you yeah. Definitely well, thanks about for coming on. I learned a lot today and I hope you guys did too. If you have any questions about the differences between the two devices, go ahead and comment below, and we'll be seeing you soon, we'll see you next time. Thank you so much for having me yeah.

Source : iFixit