Hasta La Gadget!

A teardown of the new 13-inch MacBook Air reveals the logic board, in its tiny, mighty glory. Photo courtesy of iFixit

A quick peek under the hood of Apple’s new MacBook Air reveals the company’s diligent efforts to squeeze in its brand-new Thunderbolt technology.

Gadget repair site iFixit dissected the new laptop to look at its chip board, which includes an Intel Core i5 processor and an integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics chip. The chip layout opens space for an Intel platform controller hub with Thunderbolt technology.

“Shifting to integrated graphics on the processor freed up a lot of room on the board — enough for Apple to add the sizeable Thunderbolt-capable Platform Controller Hub,” iFixit explained in a press release.

Apple released the upgraded MacBook Air on Wednesday. The newest additions to the notebook are backlit keyboards and Intel’s Thunderbolt connectivity. The Thunderbolt port technology allows for speedy data transfer that puts USB to shame.

As for wireless, the new Airs feature a Broadcom BCM20702 Bluetooth board, which supports BLE. Unlike previous generations’ Bluetooth, the new Air has 128-bit AES security, 6-millisecond latency, and better power efficiency. With OSX Lion, you might’ve noticed that the icon on the upper right is no longer the AirPort, but just “Wi-Fi,” powered by a Broadcom BCM4322 Intensi-fi Single-Chip 802.

Apple laptops in the past have been notoriously hot (temperature wise — not just in terms of looks), and to prevent unintended combustion, last-gen Airs received hefty dollops of thermal paste. The new Air, it seems, has resolved some of the cooling issues because there is far less paste than in the last generation, though the fan is still conspicuous, according to iFixit.

Previous Airs missed out on the backlit keyboard featured on the corpulent MacBook Pro. Now, from not-so-deep inside, a backlight cable powers the LEDs that illuminate the keys. But the MacBook Pro kids get one thing to brag about: the Air’s thin screen can’t accommodate FaceTime HD.

The Air’s upgrades, thanks to the circuitry inside that’s organized like a perfect game of Tetris, comes at a price. This laptop is not meant for tinkering, even in the name of repair. The RAM is soldered in (read: not upgradable or exchangeable) and the LCD panel so snug that it’s tedious to replace. Luckily, the solid-state drive (SSD), the quick, more stable, but smaller alternative to spinning-disc hard drives, isn’t soldered in, so it’s possible to upgrade for more storage.

Should anything catastrophic happen to their Air, owners will have to schlep to the nearest Apple Store — the laptop doesn’t come with a USB recovery drive this time around. Be careful with this thing.

Warranties be damned, iFixit got its hands on the newly announced MacBook Air and immediately did its thing, digging into the super-thin laptop like a kid at Christmas. Not all that much to see from the outside of the device, save for that new Thunderbolt port and some shiny new keyboard backlighting. Things are a bit different inside, however, including an Intel Core i5 processor, a Bluetooth 4.0 chip, and a general lack of thermal paste. As for putting the thing back together again — the Air scores a four out of ten for repairability, so maybe don’t try this at home.

iFixit tears down new MacBook Air, beholds the miracle of backlighting originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  iFixit  | Email this | Comments

The Droid 3 has an impressive spec sheet, with updated hardware compared to the two prior generations. (Photo courtesy iFixit)

With its souped-up specs and slimmer profile, Motorola’s latest Droid iteration is a definite improvement on the company’s previous two models. Too bad you’ll be hard-pressed to fix the thing if you break it.

Gadget repair site iFixit cracked open the Droid 3 Android smartphone to find a host of improvements. Among those is a big perk for the world-traveling types, as well as a processor update for improved computing power.

In a big bonus for the frequent flying crowd, the Droid 3 comes with a SIM card, which lets you make phone calls while in countries other than the United States. The Vodafone-carried SIM — which runs on the Vodafone network, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world — allows for data and telephone services in over 200 countries outside of the United States. There’s one big caveat, however: Data roaming charges outside of the United States may reach as high as twenty bucks per megabyte.

The Droid 3 comes complete with its own SIM card, which allows for international phone calls. (Photo courtesy iFixit)

Though not the first phone to run Android, Motorola’s first Droid was the first smartphone running Google’s platform to prove incredibly popular. When the Android platform first launched on HTC’s G1 in 2008, initial phone sales were decent — by no means a failure. Motorola and Verizon, however, beefed up the marketing budget for the first Droid-branded phone, pumping almost $100 million into the handset’s launch. The big bet paid off: Over 5 million Droid phones sold in the first six months after the phone’s release. Motorola hopes it can continue its hot streak by continuing to promote its Droid brand.

It’s important to note that there is a global version of the Droid 2 with a SIM installed, but if you’re looking for something of a hardware update, the Droid 3 may be a good fit.

Each generation of the Droid has gradually stepped up its computing power. The first-generation Droid phone came with a 600-MHz ARM-based processor, and the Droid 2 bumped that processing power up to 1 GHz with its single-core chip. Motorola’s Droid 3 comes with a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 1-GHz processor, competitive with other recent dual-core smartphone releases; more cores means more tasks can be processed simultaneously.

If you’re prone to dropping devices, the Droid 3 isn’t exactly a breeze to repair. Most of the internal components are connected by a single ribbon cable, “meaning that replacing one requires replacing them all,” says iFixit. And if you crack your screen, you’re sorta screwed — at least from an accessibility standpoint. You’ll have to take the whole phone apart to get to your LCD.

A single ribbon cable connects the major internal parts, making it difficult to repair and replace busted pieces. (Photo courtesy iFixit)

Check out the rest of the teardown and iFixit’s full weigh-in here.

The 12 chips inside Apple’s Thunderbolt cable might justify its high, high price. Photos iFixit

It might not mitigate the ridiculous $50 price-tag, but iFixit’s teardown of Apple’s “lightning fast” Thunderbolt cable at least goes some way towards showing why it doesn’t cost the same as any other dumb cable.

After picking up the new wonder-cable and digging into its “suspicious” looking sturdy plastic sleeve, iFixit’s Miroslav Djuric was confronted with a lot of hefty metal shielding. One soldering iron and a bit of chopping later and he was in.

So what’s inside: The cable contains 12 individual chips, almost as many chips as the Smart Cover has magnets, plus a (small) handful of sundry resistors and other electronic-y type bits. The main brains seem to be in the two Gennum GN2033 chips, one in each end. The GN2033 is the “[i]ndustry’s first in-connector 10Gb/s transceiver chip for Thunderbolt.”

It would seem that a Thunderbolt cable is in fact a tiny computer.

So that, I’d guess, is where your money is going. Apple has actually been cutting the costs of cables recently, most famously with the $20 HDMI cable which managed to undercut pretty much everyone else when it was introduced. I’m not saying there isn’t a decent profit margin on the Thunderbolt cable — there surely is — but at least you’re getting something other than copper strands and plastic for your cash.

What Makes the Thunderbolt Cable Lightning Fast [iFixit]

See Also:

• Apple Releases Thunderbolt Cable. Now All We Need Are Thunderbolt …
• How Thunderbolt Could Hook Up Notebooks With Powerful Peripherals …

It’s already made an early debut, just to sell out in a matter a hours, and now Samsung’s answer to the Chromebook, the Series 5, is getting some attention of a more destructive sort. The folks over at iFixit have proven once again that ripping apart consumer electronics is not only therapeutic, but also enlightening, this time putting Google’s ultraportable under the knife. On top of the specs we already have, this Chromebook’s inner workings reveal 2GB of non-upgradable DDR3 RAM (the CR-48 apparently packed upgradable RAM), Intel NM10 graphics, a Qualcomm Gobi WWAN board, an Atheros AR9382 802.11n WiFi chip, and a 16GB SanDisk SSD. If you want even more intimate details (and have some cash to burn) you can wait to rip into the Chromebook yourself — or you could to do the practical thing, and click on the source link below.

Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook gets iFixit teardown, lays bare its telling internals originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Wired  |  iFixit  | Email this | Comments