Apple iPhone 18 Pro series motherboard diagrams:

Fast Technology reported that in late June, Tata Electronics, one of Apple’s core suppliers in India, suffered a major cybersecurity incident. Information about the iPhone 18, which was still in the internal confidential stage and had not yet been officially released, was leaked to the public by hackers in advance.

Of all the content leaked this time, the most valuable for technical reference is the complete motherboard design diagram of the iPhone 18 Pro series. The diagram confirms that Apple’s dual-layer motherboard sandwich SoC solution, which it had used for many years, has been completely abandoned .

The leaked iPhone 18 Pro motherboard design diagrams clearly show that Apple has retained the previously well-received L-shaped motherboard design, while placing the A20 Pro chip directly on the surface of the motherboard.

This design allows the SoC to directly contact the heat dissipation medium such as heat dissipation graphite and VC heat sink inside the chassis. Heat can be dissipated outward without penetrating multiple layers of PCB board, which greatly reduces the overall thermal resistance of the chip and significantly improves the temperature control performance during long-term high-load operation.

In addition, the NAND flash memory that was originally exposed on the iPhone 18 Pro has been moved to the middle layer between the two motherboards, so the outer layer of the device can no longer directly contact the hard drive chip.

If users want to expand the phone’s hard drive capacity later, they must first heat the dual-layer motherboard to separate the layers through high temperature. After replacing the hard drive chip with one of the corresponding capacity, they must also redo the soldering process to precisely bond the two layers of the motherboard together. The process difficulty, time consumption, and risk of scrapping the phone are greatly increased. If they are not careful, the entire phone may be scrapped.

The leaked motherboard design diagrams also confirm that the Qualcomm Snapdragon X80 5G baseband supports 6Rx reception capability, with a downlink speed of 10Gbps and an uplink speed of 3.5Gbps. It is equipped with Qualcomm SDR740 dual RF ICs, multiple independent image power supply chips, including wide-angle power supply U6100, telephoto power supply U6300, LiDAR power supply U6400, camera main power supply U5600, and UWB ultra-wideband module U_ARROW_R, etc. These hardware configurations are all regular iterative upgrades of the Pro series, and no unexpected cutting-edge technology configurations have been revealed.