The electronic parts reseller acquired an iPhone 4 on Tuesday night, two days before its planned launch, and began posting a teardown, as they call the gadget examinations.
We published a profile of IFixit in Wednesday's Times, detailing the company's last noteworthy teardown, the iPad 3G, compatible with AT&T's wireless network. IFixit rips open most Apple products, and we noted that the operation's iPhone 4 teardown was expected on the Thursday launch, a conservative estimate.
Perhaps not surprisingly for the tenacious bunch, the workers managed to track down someone with the new phone in Mountain View, Calif., after fishing for leads in the Twitter ecosystem.
An engineer at a Silicon Valley start-up, who asked not to be identified ("No, it's not stolen," noted IFixit co-founder Luke Soules), volunteered his shiny, new iPhone that FedEx happened to deliver early to the mad gadget scientists.
The findings? IFixit confirmed rumors that the iPhone 4 contains double the random-access memory of the iPad, meaning those 512 megabytes facilitate more applications for quick-switch multitasking.
