Chosen Solution
I have a cracked iphone 4, and I plan to replace the front display and back panel. The iphone 6 recently came out, and I have little interest in spending the money to replace my phone, but I wouldn’t mind upgrading the processor in my 4 if possible. I can’t find much on the subject, but I wonder how difficult it might be to replace the A4 processor. Would an A8 processor be compatible? Is the chip socketed or soldered? What kinds of tools might I need if I wanted to attempt to do this? Thanks!
It’s not about feasibility, it’s about possibility. It is impossible to upgrade the processor because the pin layout is different for each model.
I don’t mean to sound rude, but I’ll just be honest when I say that you’re barking up the wrong tree here. There really is no way to upgrade an iPhone of any model. They’re just not a device that was meant to be upgraded. The only option to upgrade an iPhone in any way would be to install a motherboard of the same model with more storage. In other words, you could replace your 16 GB iPhone 4 motherboard with a 32 GB version. Of course, that wouldn’t help with performance, it would just give you more storage. If if upgrades were possible, they would be cost prohibitive. Heck, even just a straight replacement motherboard for your iPhone 4 right now would cost nearly as much as replacing the phone. You mention that you’re looking to “speed it up”. Have you done a restore of the phone and set it up as a new phone lately? Doing that periodically will keep the phone running at its best, as this gets rid of any clutter that has built up in the depths of the operating system that you can’t see.
I replaced the cpu in my iPhone 4s with one from a busted iPhone 6+ my friend had. Just used an exacto knife (while powered off obviously lol) and cut to size, popped the motherboard in my 4s and plugged it in. Don’t let these guys discourage you. It wasn’t that hard and the performance increase was HUGE.
