As expected, Samsung’s new Galaxy S22-series phones are difficult to take apart and repair. A new iFixit teardown video confirms as much, though more interestingly, this first look inside the Galaxy S22 shows the wild steps Samsung took to keep its new phones from overheating.

We heard a lot about the Galaxy S22’s thermal challenges before its release. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip is significantly less power-efficient than previous mobile processors, and according to leakers, Samsung bailed on the Exynos 2200 launch event due to uncertainty over the chipset’s thermal performance.

Samsung itself has confirmed these thermal issues, sort of. The company spent a portion of its Galaxy S22 launch event discussing a new stainless steel vapor chamber cooling system, which is thinner, cooler, and more expensive than traditional copper heat pipes. And more recently, Samsung confirmed that it throttles game performance on Galaxy phones to avoid overheating—an interesting revelation, as other companies caught throttling their phones usually do it to artificially extend battery life.

We’ve reviewed both the base-model Galaxy S22 and the S22 Ultra, and in our tests, neither phone overheats. But a fancy vapor chamber and game throttling aren’t just responsible for its thermal resilience. As shown in iFixit’s teardown, the Galaxy S22 contains a ton of small parts to help dissipate heat.

Samsung stuck plenty of thermal paste in the Galaxy S22, plus what iFixit calls “oodles of graphite tape.” And yeah, there’s plenty of that graphite tape—keep an eye out for it while you watch the teardown.

Because the Galaxy S22-series phones are just incremental updates over their predecessors, they don’t contain too many secrets. Still, Samsung did more than just stick a vapor chamber and some graphite tape in these phones. Check out iFixit’s full teardown video to see inside the phone and learn its repairability score.

Source: iFixit