Former software engineer Scotty Allen of Strange Parts created an awesome video that follows him on a journey as he builds a working iPhone 6s 16GB from scratch “entirely from parts bought in the public cell phone markets in Huaqiangbei, China.”
You might wonder why I chose to make an iPhone 6s and not an iPhone 7. I had two reasons. The first was that I already own an iPhone 6s that I bought in an Apple store, and I thought I might end up needing to have an identical phone to the one I was trying to build that I knew was assembled by Apple to compare against. In the end, this was never really an issue, and I never ended up having to open it up. It is nice to be able to show people the phone I built side-by-side with a phone bought in an Apple store though.
However, the other reason, which turned out to be far more important, is that iPhone 7 parts are pretty hard to come by in the markets. It’s not totally clear why this is, but I have some ideas. (read more)
