Hasta La Gadget!

The folks over at iFixit have a long history of tearing through the latest and greatest gadgets, but recently they went in a different direction: tearing down a Macintosh 128k … Continue reading

This week the folks at iFixit have taken to the Mac Pro for 2013, and under the hood they’ve found some extremely favorable results. In addition to finding what iFixit … Continue reading

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

Filed under: Misc, Gaming, Tablets, Microsoft, Nokia

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Not too long ago Sony offered up their official unboxing and teardown video giving us a look at what comes in the package you buy a new PlayStation 4 and the hardware inside the enclosure. Typically, when we talk about tear downs around here it’s the geeks over at iFixit ripping something open and giving us a glimpse of what goes on under the shiny outside of our favorite gadgets. The last time we talked about iFixit taking something apart from Sony was when they gutted the PlayStation Vita. This time, they’re back with a tear down of the new PlayStation 4 game console.

It looks like the console is surprisingly easy to take apart. In fact, iFixit gave the PS4 a repairability score of 8 out of 10 – a rarity with today’s ever more disposable gadgets. One thing that is particularly easy to change is the hard drive hidden underneath a snap-on cover and secured with a single screw.

Sony uses a normal 2.5-inch 5400 RPM 500GB laptop hard drive. Presumably, you can cram just about any capacity hard drive or SSD you can think of inside to expand or speed up your storage space. Hardware highlights inside the PS4 include Sony’s CXD9002G system on a chip, which combines AMD Jaguar CPU and Radeon graphics cores, there’s also 8GB of Samsung GDDR5 RAM, another 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM, and 256MB of flash RAM.

One thing that iFixit did note during its teardown is that it was impossible get the heatsink off the EMI shielding. Apparently, Sony uses an incredibly strong glue to secure those two components together. They also noted that like many have observed, the console does wobble slightly if you push on it, and offers up the most sage bit of advice on the topic: “don’t push on it.”

If you’re interested in seeing all of the guts of the PS4 splayed open, head on over to iFixit for the full teardown.

Not content with Sony’s official teardown of the PlayStation 4, iFixit has started work on its own thorough analysis of the console’s internals. The dissection isn’t complete yet, but early evidence shows that Sony is using standard measures to deter modders and tinkerers, including security screws and lengthy passages in the user guide about how “analysis” of the PS4’s components is “not authorized.” (With the replaceable hard drive being an awkward exception.) Now, this happens to be exactly the sort of language that gets up iFixit‘s nose, and it could well hurt the PS4’s score for repairability and recyclability. The site also reports a potential issue with the HDMI port, spotted earlier by Kotaku, in which a small metal obstruction in front of the port on some units could potentially stop video output if you’re not careful when you first plug in your cable (although the HDMI pins can apparently be bent back into position). In any case, we’ll update this post as soon as the experts have splayed everything out and come to a verdict.

Update: Though you might expect a low repairability score from a gaming console — especially in a smallish case like Sony’s Playstation 4 — iFixit gave it eight out of 10. All things considered, that’s an excellent mark, which the teardown site chalked up to the absence of adhesives and a non-proprietary, user-replaceable hard drive. Security screws and tamper seals put a slight damper on things, but the biggest markdown came from a sharp mid-plane which resulted in a cut finger. Naturally, the site included a pic of said wound, adding that “we wear our repair scars with pride.”

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Sony

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Source: iFixit, Kotaku