Fcc Accidentally Leaked Iphone Schematics

If that were the case, there would be some examples of it like the person you are responding to asked for.

I believe monopolies and megacorporations are a necessity for authoritarian governments.

Those are actives. On a highly integrated device like this it would most likely be an application-specific PMIC (power management IC) that isn't generally available. It would be an IC that would be salvaged from one board and transferred to another.

Phones do not have electrolytic capacitors because they are too small.

A competitor can legally use the information to build their own product; they just can't reproduce the drawing.

The schematic is also incredibly valuable. It's a blueprint to Apple's design philosophy and the only public map of how their custom silicon actually functions in the real world. That's priceless information for any competitor.

Because the FCC didn’t publish specifics. I think one would get better, more specific information from a teardown. It’s even in TFA:

”Competitors could simply buy a handset and open it up to get to this information…”

Granted, there are some specifics that could be interesting from a design analysis perspective like the bill of materials (BoM) cost, or the specific choices made in the design (e.g. using a buck regulator IC to improve efficiency, tradeoffs between cost and redundancy, etc...).

I maintain that most of the specifics contained in the schematic aren't useful for an engineer designing another phone. An experienced electronic engineer facing the same design problems would make similar decisions regarding which components to use, based on known principles - but that's only if they could access Apple's proprietary chips in the first place.

Everything we can see in the schematic could have been generated from a teardown as you mentioned. Not sure what "certain consumers" you're referring to - I imagine the schematics would help repair shops most in knowing what test points to diagnose and what components are involved.

Huawei, Xiaomi, et al. don't need Apple's schematics. They have plenty of design engineers of their own, and can't access Apple's chips anyway. The parts that do use market-available chips don't have any critical details that might take away Apple's edge.

My mom's Samsung phone suddenly failed to charge a year ago, but in a weird way. Tried some tricks but it ended up getting stuck on a black screen during boot.

I handed it to a repair shop in town that had good reviews. Three days later they called back. I asked what was wrong, and it turned out they had to replace one charging chip, a power sequencing chip and a third chip I can't recall the purpose of, along with the USB port. The reason it took so long was they got a bit further for each chip they swapped.

I'm in Norway where prices are high, and we have a 25% VAT on top. I paid $180 including VAT, or $144 before VAT.

For that I might have gotten a very cheap Android phone on sale, however my mom's phone was a premium model from a few years earlier. Besides, less e-waste and saved me time reinstalling everything. Personally I think the repair was well worth it.

There's discussion here in Norway to drop VAT on repair jobs such as this, and in that case I think it would definitely make sense to repair such cases.

Laptops, motherboards, microwave ovens and whatever else has "commodity PCBs" are much more repairable than the highly size-optimized phone market.

...on the open market.

However, if your repair shop exists just down the street from one of Apple's component supplier's factories, then knowing the part number of one of the ICs or other actives, might be enough to let you walk in there one day and submit a hand-written PO for a few boxes of said part (...as a cash transaction, of course.)

Right, but, knowing what the nominal in-line resistance is between any two pins on the board, will let you do some empirical tests to determine whether a given black-screen fault lies in the board itself, vs in one or more of the SMT components, no? (And so whether you should bother attempting to salvage the board, vs just scraping off the high-value parts and chucking it in the bin.)

You are so out of touch, PCB repair is very common.

This is just one example of via/pad repair: https://rewa.tech/iphone-12-pro-max-not-booting/

The whole repair industry in China is really insane.

>The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.

This is always the case, but there is difference between swapping the whole camera module and just swapping the camera lens.

Hell they even use fiber laser to fix stripe line screen.

At GHz frequencies, the PCB isn't a passive substrate; it's an active RF component. Managing signal integrity, controlling impedance, and mitigating EMI in a dense layout is a monumental engineering challenge, not a solved problem from the "1930s radio" era.

The AMD comparison is backward. AMD provides public datasheets and reference designs. This schematic is valuable precisely because Apple's silicon is a black box. It's the only public blueprint for a successful, validated implementation.

The chip and board are a co-designed system. A brilliant SoC is useless without the board-level engineering to power it cleanly and cool it within a tiny physical envelope. That system integration is the R&D.

You claim this is worthless because of the custom Apple chips, but that’s precisely what makes it so valuable. Competitors aren't trying to drop an Apple A19 into their phone; they are learning how Apple solves the universal engineering problems that come with supporting a high-performance, custom SoC or their specific parts.

Seeing the complete power delivery network and high-speed routing for that specific chip is a masterclass. When they see 'a capacitor here,' they learn Apple's validated strategy for handling a transient load or suppressing a specific EMI source on a cutting-edge processor. That engineering principle is absolutely portable to their own custom silicon from Qualcomm or Samsung.

That is the very definition of saving R&D. It’s not about copying parts, it’s about learning the architectural patterns from a successful, finished product to avoid months of costly trial and error.