Orders for the new iPhone 12 mini have started arriving for customers, and the team at iFixit did a two-part teardown—of both an EU and US model— to figure out how Apple managed to include 5G hardware and the usual iPhone components into such a little device.
The first thing you notice looking at the internal images is the smaller battery in the mini, which measures up to similar iPhone models surprisingly well, iFixit finds, with 8.57 Wh.
“That’s more juice than the iPhone SE 2020‘s 6.96 Wh, but understandably short of the 10.78 Wh of the standard 12 it’s stacked on top of,” iFixit notes. It’s less than the 10.78 Wh of the iPhone 12 battery, though.
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The Taptic Engine, speakers, and MagSafe ring are all included in the mini in smaller versions to save space. But Apple managed to fit the same-sized camera as its other iPhone models into the mini, which iFixit suggests may have come at the expense of battery life— something The Verge’s Dieter Bohn encountered in our iPhone mini review.
The mini camera has the same ƒ/1.6 wide-angle and ƒ/2.4 ultra wide-angle cameras found in the iPhone 12, the teardown shows.
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Overall, iFixit found the iPhone 12 mini to be quite similar to its larger counterparts: “The iPhone 12 mini is a small phone with big ambitions. We’re surprised by how familiar the internals look compared to other iPhones this year, given the differences in size among them.”
Check out iFixit’s full iPhone 12 mini teardown here. And see what The Verge reviewers think of the new iPhone models: