Schematics are essential in iPhone and iPad logic board repair. Unfortunately, they’re also illegal to own. They’re considered proprietary property of the companies that they belong to. In this case, Apple. I remember back in the days when schematics were widely available for pretty much everything. These days, you’d be hard pressed to find schematics for some hardware that you own. How do you fix these things without schematics? Well, it’s hard. One way would be to use a known good part from a known good logic board of the exact same specifications, then compare the readings to the bad part. The problem with doing this is that it’s very time consuming and more expensive, since you would have to buy donor boards for every piece of device that you’re repairing. With schematics, troubleshooting is a lot easier.
Although schematics are illegal to sell and distribute, there are way to obtain these schematics online. You just have to look. Here are some ideas on where to get schematics for most iPhone and iPads.
- UnionRepair.com (4/4S/5/5c/5S/6/6P, 6S/6SP, 7/7P, 8, 8P, X, XS, XS Max) (ipads)
- Forum.gsmhosting.com (freely downloadable schematics)
- Ebay.com
- Laptop-schematics.com ($275 for the most comprehensive schematics and boardviews)
Understand that not every schematic is available for every device. Most files come in PDF format. I like viewing the PDF files using the following software:
- PDF Reader X Pro (mac)
- Sumatra PDF (windows)
