iFixit: iPad 2 glass is 27 percent thinner

Seth Weintraub | Mar 11 2011 - 10:06 pm PT

iFixit does a roundup of the iPad 2 teardown with their Teardown Highlights. Most notable in their summary, the iPad 2’s glass is significantly thinner than the previous iPad. Obviously that helps for weight loss but it also could theoretically make it more fragile. We noted the weigh loss in our LCD screen preview a few months ago. More from iFixit:

We did a quick glass and LCD thickness comparison:
- iPad 1: lcd = 3.2 mm glass = .85 mm
- iPad 2: lcd = 2.4 mm glass = .62 mm
The thickness of these components — especially that of the glass — could drastically reduce the durability of the device, especially the glass’ resistance to shattering. We’ll see in due time if the percentage of folks with broken iPad 2 front glass is dramatically different than that of the original iPad.
Lifting off the LCD exposes the iPad 2′s battery. We found a 3.8V, 25 watt-hour unit. That’s just a hair more than the original iPad’s 24.8 watt-hours, so any improved battery performance should be attributed to software and other hardware improvements.
We confirmed via software that the iPad 2 indeed has 512 MB of RAM.
The markings on the 1 GHz Apple A5 dual-core processor appear to be Samsung’s, but Chipworks will investigate in the forthcoming days to find out for sure.
Other components that power the iPad 2:
- Toshiba TH58NVG7D2FLA89 16GB NAND Flash
- Broadcom BCM5973KFBGH Microcontroller
- Broadcom BCM5974 CKFBGH capacitative touchscreen controller
- Texas Instruments CD3240B0 11AZ4JT touchscreen line driver
- Broadcom BCM43291HKUBC Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM tuner combo chip
- S6T2MLC N33C50V Power Management IC
- ST Micro AGD8 2103 gyroscope
- ST Micro LIS331DLH accelerometer
There’s also an Apple-branded 338S0940 A0BZ1101 SGP chip. This looks like the Cirrus audio codec Chipworks found in the Verizon iPhone, but they’ll have to get it off the board to make sure!