Apple’s iPhone X just hit shelves and reviewers wasted no time pulling it apart.

A delve into the iPhone X’s guts from iFixit shows Apple made some interesting design choices, for the first time including two battery cells instead of one, and folding the phone’s motherboard in half.

Saving space
The dual battery cells are most the obvious difference in the interior of the iPhone X compared with previous iPhones. The set up delivers a combined 2716mAh. While the battery cells still take up most of the room in the device, iFixit noted the L-shape format they’re in gave Apple room to get “creative” with the placement of other components.

Folding the motherboard is another space-saving tweak, albeit not unique in terms of Apple devices: “The iPhone X logic board is the first double-stacked board we’ve seen in an iPhone since the very first iPhone,” iFixit reported.

IHS Markit analyst Wayne Lam also highlighted the new board design in tweets marking his own teardown progress.

When stacked, iFixit notes the iPhone X board is about 70 per cent of the size of the motherboard in the iPhone 8 Plus. However, the pieces unfold to a total area 35 per cent larger. While iFixit gave Apple points for thinking outside the box here, the site notes the design will make board-level repair “extremely difficult” or even “near impossible”.

The secret behind Face ID
The teardown also revealed how one of the iPhone X’s new features – Face ID – actually works.

Based on Apple’s TrueDepth camera system, iFitit explained the feature first floods a user’s face with infrared light. Once the front-facing camera confirms a face is present, an infrared dot projector sends out a grid of dots over a user’s face to make a 3-D map. The map is read by the infrared camera, which sends the data deeper into the phone for processing.

Overall, iFixit gave the iPhone X a repairability score of 6, noting waterproofing measures, a “liberal use of screws”, and complex assemblies will make any repairs tricky.