IPHONE 14 & 14 PLUS SCHEMATICS
With hundreds of pieces precisely laid out over the course of many weeks, I am proud to finally be Introducing the iPhone 14 & 14 Plus schematics.
At long last, my iPhone 14 schematics are done! This includes schematics for the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Plus, & iPhone 14 Pro Max. This project has been months in the making, and I am so happy that:
You get to see all the work I’ve been doing behind closed doors these past few months, and;
I can finally rest my very strained eyes for a minute.
This project began on September 21, just a few days after the iPhone 14 became publicly available and the teardown started to come out. The photos released by iFixit were indispensable in this project, so I thank them once again for making these publicly available!
iPhone 14 Pro Schematics
If you’re looking for the iPhone 14 Pro & 14 Pro Max schematics, they’re available
The iPhone 14 features a new larger ƒ/1.5 main camera and ƒ/2.4 Ultra Wide sensor with sensor-shift optical image stabilization.
One significant design decision to point out about the iPhone 14 & iPhone 14 Plus schematics is that it’s are both backward and horizontally flipped.
This decision, I’ll explain more in a moment, was made because the iPhone 14 has received a significant redesign to its enclosure to improve its repairability. With previous phones, and as is still the case on the iPhone 14 Pro, damaging the back of the device would require replacing everything but the display; essentially, a new phone. But with the iPhone 14, Apple introduced a protective aluminum panel sandwiched between the display and back of the device, allowing the two sides to be repaired far more efficiently. This still allows the glass front to be exchanged, but it now allows the back glass to get the same treatment without replacing most of the internal components.
From a design perspective, this means that if I were to make a traditional schematic as though you were looking through the glass at the components, all you would see is the aluminum shield and not much else. Pretty boring. So instead, what I did was remake the schematic as though you were opening the phone from the back, allowing you to see the camera and components in an entirely new way. This is what I meant when I referred to the schematic as flipped.
The better-binned A15 with 6-core CPU & 5-core GPU makes its way to the iPhone 14.
The decision to tackle the schematic this way also presented new challenges as I tried to make these my most detailed schematics to date.
And by far, the more intricate pieces on the iPhone 14 & iPhone 14 Plus were the camera modules. Drafting these involved tinkering with layers & multiple fills to create a sense of depth to construct new elements & textures like the camera sensor, glass cover, and sensor shift mechanism.
I’ve got 99 problems, and figuring out which layer goes on top of which layer has been most of them in recent weeks. The iPhone 14 Plus Taptic engine, battery, and lightning port are pictured below.
Other parts of the design process included crafting hundreds of components with overlapping layers, shading, and textures that all needed to fit together perfectly. And even if each component takes just 2-3 minutes to make, by the time I hand-made all 482 individual pieces (iPhone 14 Plus), I was looking at a project that took north of 20+ hours PER SCHEMATIC!
Side-by-side comparison of the iPhone 14 & iPhone 14 Plus show many of the similarities between the internals of these two devices.
Fortunately, the iPhone 14 & 14 Plus shared a lot of similarly shaped components, so thanks to that and good layer management on my part (phew!), once I finished the iPhone 14 schematic, I was able to draft one for the iPhone 14 Plus in about half that time.
So without further ado, I would love to present the iPhone 14 & 14 Plus schematics available in Blue, Purple, Midnight, Starlight, Product(RED), & Raw. I choose to make these free of charge
