A 163-page PDF of the iPhone 16e electrical schematics was briefly made public by the FCC, despite Apple’s express request to keep them confidential. Here’s what they showed.
What happened?
Over the weekend, secret electric schematics for the iPhone 16e models A3212/A3408/A3409/A3410 were briefly made public in the FCC’s equipment authorization database, and were mirrored by fccid.io before being pulled.
The filing included a separate letter in which Apple requested confidentiality for the schematics and block diagrams, and the documents remained online long enough to be noticed and downloaded.
The publishing of these documents was likely the result of a mistake by a certification body or lab during the filing process. The metadata showed that short-term confidentiality and permanent confidentiality were marked as “no,” contrary to Apple’s explicit request, which likely caused them to be auto-published by FCCID.io.
How serious is this leak?
That depends. For end users of the iPhone 16e, it’s not that serious. But the electrical schematics detail board-level components, antenna locations, connectors, block diagrams, test pads, and other parts of the logic board, which is information that could be highly relevant to hardware researchers and even independent repair shops.
The schematics can also offer insight into how Apple routes signals between major chips, how test/debug pads are laid out, and what hidden traces exist inside the “sandwich” logic board. In a nutshell, this makes fault tracing and board repair easier, and it could help security researchers identify potentially new hardware attack surfaces.
So far, Apple and the FCC haven’t commented on the leak.
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