Hasta La Gadget!

By now, the fine folks at iFixit have probably seen the insides of more MacBooks than they care to count, but the guilty pleasure of ripping those aluminum cases to shreds keeps them (and us) coming back for more. This week, while we gave our new 15-inch MacBook Pro a thorough review, they were busy tearing theirs apart and admiring the juicy insides. Aside from the obvious processor upgrade, not much has changed since 2009 except the odd antenna and tri-wing screw, but it appears that the AirPort / Bluetooth assembly now resembles that of the 13-inch unibody MacBook. You will also find nice hi-res shots of the brand-new Intel BD82HM55 Platform Controller Hub — also known as Intel’s HM55 Express chipset — at the source link.

15-inch Core i5 MacBook Pro torn asunder: no alarms and no surprises originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Before many of us even had a chance to buy an iPad, teardown company iFixit dissected one and analyzed its innards.

Tearing apart the iPad was a 31-step process, and a look inside reveals some interesting insights. The highlights are as follows, courtesy of iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens:

• The iPad’s battery has five times the capacity of the battery in the iPhone. The iPad actually has two batteries wired in parallel, for a total of 24.8 Watt-hours.
• On average, the iPad sips just 2.5 Watts. That’s 1/5 the power of a compact fluorescent bulb!
• The A4 processor is a Package-on-Package (PoP), with at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other. A4 is packaged just like the iPhone processors, microprocessor in one package and 2 DRAMs in the other package. They’re all sandwiched together in a very nice and thin PoP.
• The iPad has 512 MB RAM inside the A4 processor package. iFixit had to X-Ray the processor to confirm this. The X-Ray revealed two layers of RAM. In addition to the ARM processor, the A4 package contains two stacked 256 MB Samsung K4 SDRAM dies.
• The rumored slot for a camera is actually taken up by the ambient light sensor.
• The glass panel is quite thick: about 1.18 mm, compared to the iPhone’s 1.02 mm thick glass. This ensures durability with the panel’s large size.
• The touch circuit design is more similar to the old 2G and early 3G iPhones than the current 3GS. Chip analysis firm Chipworks told iFixit that “there is so much room in the iPad that Apple didn’t need to use small chips, just the right ones and cheap ones.”

These tidbits of information added together explain just how the iPad gets such epically long battery life (12 hours, according to some tests) and incredible speed. From our testing today, the iPad is surprisingly fast, especially with Google Maps’ street view and web browsing, and we’ve barely even dented the battery.

For the full iPad teardown and more photos, visit iFixit’s tutorial.

See Also:

• Punked: iFixit Tears Down 'Apple Tablet'
• Gallery: iPhone 3GS Teardowns Reveal Underclocked CPU, More …
• iFixit disassemble new iPod Shuffle
• If You Love Your Gadgets, Tear Them Apart
• Contest: Tear Apart Old Sony Gadgets, Win a PSP Go or PS3 Slim …

We’ve already told you everything you need to know about the Nexus One. Still, you might be curious to see Google’s self-proclaimed “superphone” splayed wide to reveal a Samsung-branded OLED display, Qualcomm QSD8250 “Snapdragon” 1 GHz ARM processor, and Synaptics touchscreen controller. Of interest is a Broadcom chip labeled Broadcom BCM4329EKUBG. Why? Well, the BCM4329 (albeit, without the “EKUBG” qualifier) is capable of 802.11n (HTC only lists 802.11b/g) WiFi in addition to FM transmitter and receiver. Bet you didn’t know that? Picture of the Broadcom chip after the break.

Update: Just noticed that Google does list 802.11n on the specs page although HTC does not.

Continue reading Nexus One teardown reveals 802.11n WiFi and FM transmitter

Nexus One teardown reveals 802.11n WiFi and FM transmitter originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you were thinking of tearing apart your own Droid, let us direct you first to this quote straight from the folks at phoneWreck: “no easy task.” It seems that even finding some of the screws involved in holding the mess together was a problem, but at the end of the day, good old-fashioned human ingenuity prevailed over… well, other human ingenuity, and the phone fell asunder into the 16 pieces you see here. As you might imagine, there’s a bit of industrial magic involved in fitting a full QWERTY slide into a package this tight — but just as Moto was up to the challenge of putting it together, some dude with a little time on his hands was up to the challenge of asploding it. Needless to say, we won’t be doing this to ours.

Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola Droid torn down despite desperate cries of ‘no disassemble’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Have a Sony gadget lying around, like a broken, original PlayStation or a neglected DVD player? You might as well rip it apart for a chance to win a brand new PSP Go or a PS3 Slim.

Wired.com and hardware repair company iFixit are hosting a contest. All you have to do to participate is take apart any Sony product and snap photos of the teardown process. Post your photos using iFixit’s teardown gallery tool, along with your observations about the teardown process or the gadget’s insides, and you’re good to go.

Trust us, it’ll be a blast! We’re not asking you to pull a MacGyver and turn a ripped up CD player into a remote-controlled boomerang. (Although, that would be kind of cool.) Just impress us with some neat photos and clever analysis.

A panel of five Wired.com staff members will judge your submissions. You can win one of two prizes. The winner of “Most Creative Teardown” will get a PSP Go (along with a T-shirt). And the winner of “Best Overall Teardown” will receive a PS3 Slim (plus a T-shirt). We want you to be imaginative, so we’re not going to list any strict guidelines. Just have some fun and learn a little about hardware while you’re at it.

iFixit will be taking submissions for two weeks, meaning the deadline is Oct. 23, 11:59 p.m. Pacific. Here are the rules in summary:

1. Take apart a Sony product.
2. Post photos of the process, and your impressions of the device, using iFixit’s teardown editor.
3. The teardowns will be judged by the Wired.com staff.
4. Contest ends Oct. 23, 11:59 p.m. Pacific time.

We’ll post pictures from the winning teardowns, plus any notable honorable mentions, right here on Gadget Lab.

Need ideas for what makes a neat teardown? Here are some examples:

• Just last month, iFixit disassembled the new iPod Touch and found a hole that could have been used for a camera. Strange, because Steve Jobs said Apple intentionally left a camera out of the iPod Touch so the device could focus on gaming! Also, iFixit found an 802.11N chip — an even faster module than the Wi-Fi chip in the new iPhone 3GS. No clue why that’s in there yet, but that’s interesting.
• When iFixit ripped apart the iPod Touch in September 2008, the company discovered a hidden Bluetooth module. This was a pleasant surprise, as Bluetooth was not unlocked by Apple until the release of iPhone OS 3.0 just four months ago. This illustrates how teardowns can reveal technology’s fascinating secrets. Who knows what else is out there that we haven’t discovered yet?

Also, iFixit provides instructions for how to write a teardown, and plenty of examples of teardowns for your reference.

For more on the bizarre culture of gadget abuse, check out our previous feature piece “If You Love Your Gadgets, Tear Them Apart.”

What are you waiting for? Dig up your old Sony junk and start ripping!

Photo: iFixit