What would you do if you were one of the very first people in the world to buy the new iPad?
If you're Luke Soules, the co-founder and CXO of iFixit, a technology repair and parts company in California, you'd rip the new tablet apart (carefully, of course) to see what it's made of.
Soules flew from Austin, Tex., where he was for SXSW, to Melbourne, Australia, so he could become not only one of the first people to buy the new iPad, but the first to legitimately take it apart.
And what he found inside was, with just a couple exceptions, pretty similar to what's in the iPad 2.
"It's pretty much as-expected inside," Miro Djuric, the director of technical communication, wrote to HuffPost in an email. "Very little has changed from the iPad 2 with regard to internals, aside from the spec bumps."
Among the most touted features of the new iPad is the 3.1-million pixel strong Retina display, which Apple promises has more pixels than any other mobile device. While the iPad that iFixit dissected featured a Samsung-made display, Reuters reported earlier this week that LG will also supply LCDs for the new tablet.
Display being removed with suction cups:
iFixit also got a peek at the new dual-core Apple A5X processor, which will deliver improved graphics:
(Click over to iFixit for more images.)
According to iFixit, other parts in the new iPad come from Toshiba, Broadcom and Qualcomm, among others.
Reuters reports that because Apple does not disclose its suppliers, teardowns provide investors with important information about what companies they may want to bet on.
Even though we now know how to take it apart, the question remains: Will it blend?
Click over to iFixit to see the complete step-by-step teardown process.
LOOK: Disassembled new iPad:
Flick through the slideshow (below) to see critics' favorite things about the new iPad. Then, read on to see their least favorite things.
