iPhone 11 Pro teardown reveals smaller logic board, larger battery

iFixit has disassembled Apple’s new iPhone models, which tells us more about the differences with last year’s phones. iFixit shot a live-stream video of the iPhone 11 Pro teardown and wrote a guide for the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

The first major difference is that the batteries in the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max are much larger than the batteries in the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.

On the iPhone 11 Pro Max, the device is .4 mm thicker and the screen is .25 mm thinner. As John Gruber expected, dropping 3D Touch from the iPhone lineup makes the screen slightly slimmer. 3D Touch required an additional layer under the display to register pressure on the screen.

That might feel like a tiny difference, but it frees up some space for the battery. The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone XS have the same single-cell L-shaped design. But the Max version has been updated to use the came single-cell design instead of two cells.

The result is that the iPhone 11 Pro Max now has a 3,969 mAh battery compared to a 3,179 mAh battery in the iPhone XS Max. It represents a nearly 25% year-over-year improvement for the Max battery.

Those hardware refinements combined with a more efficient A13 system-on-a-chip create some significant battery life improvements for the user. Apple claims that the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max last up to 4 hours and 5 hours longer respectively compared to the previous generation.

(Photo credit: iFixit)

In other news, the camera module is much bigger in this year’s new device (as expected). Apple managed to put a third camera by reducing the size of the logic board.

The logic board has the same dual-layer design that was first introduced with the iPhone X. It’s like a club sandwich of chips. Even though Apple and Qualcomm has settled its multi-billion-dollar lawsuits, the modem in the iPhones 11 Pro is still manufactured by Intel.

When it comes to things that we don’t know yet, iFixit couldn’t figure out how much RAM there is — Steve Troughton-Smith believes there might be 2GB of RAM dedicated to the camera that you wouldn’t notice on benchmarks.

Similarly, there are now two battery connectors instead of one. It’s hard to say for sure that the second connector has been added for bilateral wireless charging — it could be there for many different reasons. Rumor has it that Apple wanted to add reverse wireless charging but canned the feature at the last minute.

Overall, iFixit gives a repairability score of 6 out 10. The iPhone XS models also got a 6 out of 10 rating.

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Facebook has acquired Servicefriend, which builds ‘hybrid’ chatbots, for Calibra customer service

As Facebook prepares to launch its new cryptocurrency Libra in 2020, it’s putting the pieces in place to help it run. In one of the latest developments, it has acquired Servicefriend, a startup that built bots — chat clients for messaging apps based on artificial intelligence — to help customer service teams, TechCrunch has confirmed.

The news was first reported in Israel, where Servicefriend is based, after one of its investors, Roberto Singler, alerted local publication The Marker about the deal. We reached out to Ido Arad, one of the co-founders of the company, who referred our questions to a team at Facebook. Facebook then confirmed the acquisition with an Apple-like non-specific statement:

“We acquire smaller tech companies from time to time. We don’t always discuss our plans,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Several people, including Arad, his co-founder Shahar Ben Ami, and at least one other indicate that they now work at Facebook within the Calibra digital wallet group on their LinkedIn profiles. Their jobs at the social network started this month, meaning this acquisition closed in recent weeks. (Several others indicate that they are still at Servicefriend, meaning they too may have likely made the move as well.)

Although Facebook isn’t specifying what they will be working on, the most obvious area will be in building a bot — or more likely, a network of bots — for the customer service layer for the Calibra digital wallet that Facebook is developing.

Facebook’s plan is to build a range of financial services for people to use Calibra to pay out and receive Libra — for example, to send money to contacts, pay bills, top up their phones, buy things and more.

It remains to be seen just how much people will trust Facebook as a provider of all these. So that is where having “human” and accessible customer service experience will be essential.

“We are here for you,” Calibra notes on its welcome page, where it promises 24-7 support in WhatsApp and Messenger for its users.

Servicefriend has worked on Facebook’s platform in the past: specifically it built “hybrid” bots for Messenger for companies to use to complement teams of humans, to better scale their services on messaging platforms. In one Messenger bot that Servicefriend built for Globe Telecom in the Philippines, it noted that the hybrid bot was able to bring the “agent hours” down to under 20 hours for each 1,000 customer interactions.

Bots have been a relatively problematic area for Facebook. The company launched a personal assistant called M in 2015, and then bots that let users talk to businesses in 2016 on Messenger, with quite some fanfare, although the reality was that nothing really worked as well as promised, and in some cases worked significantly worse than whatever services they aimed to replace.

While AI-based assistants such as Alexa have become synonymous with how a computer can carry on a conversation and provide information to humans, the consensus around bots these days is that the most workable way forward is to build services that complement, rather than completely replace, teams.

For Facebook, getting its customer service on Calibra right can help it build and expand its credibility (note: another area where Servicefriend has build services is in using customer service as a marketing channel). Getting it wrong could mean issues not just with customers, but with partners and possibly regulators.

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