Hasta La Gadget!

There’s a good chance ripping apart Sony’s Alpha A99 isn’t on the to-do list of those who own the freshly released $2,800 camera — even if they are curious about the hardware’s guts. Luckily for such inquiring minds, Sony’s taken matters into its own hands and torn the DSLR apart. While it’s not your conventional play-by-play video teardown, Hirai and Co. came prepared with the camera already split into layers that showcase its major parts such as its magnesium alloy body, 35mm full-frame sensor and main circuit board. For the grand tour of the A99’s innards, hit the jump to catch the footage.

Continue reading Sony’s Alpha A99 gets torn apart, exposes its 35mm full-frame sensor (video)

Filed under: Cameras, Sony

Sony’s Alpha A99 gets torn apart, exposes its 35mm full-frame sensor (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Nov 2012 03:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We can always count on the geeks over at iFixit to buy the latest and greatest gadgets and then tear them up so we can see what they look like on the inside. It’s nice to see someone else open up their gadgets giving us a glimpse at how things are packaged and how repairable the device might be should we ever need to get into it on our own

iFixit used a heat gun, plastic opening tools, a spudger, and a T4 torx screwdriver, a T5 torx, and a set of iFixit Guitar Picks to open the tablet up.

Under its hood, iFixit found the following chips:

• NVIDIA 1.4 GHz Tegra 3 Processor
• Samsung KLMBG4GE4A 32 GB NAND Flash
• Micron 2RE22 D9QBJ 2 GB DDR3 SDRAM
• Texas Instruments TPS659110 power management IC
• Marvell 88W8797-BMP2 wireless MIMO SoC
• Wolfson 8962E low power audio codec
• Cypress Semiconductor CY8C20466A capacitive touchscreen controller

In fact, they found multiple touchscreen controllers – presumably to help detect inputs from the touch cover keyboard as well as the screen. One of the components that’s most likely to fail over time in any gadget is the battery. It appears that while the battery is glued in, it is removable and said to be easier to remove than the battery of the iPad. Though that certainly doesn’t mean that the Surface tablet is easy to repair. iFixit rates the Surface tablet on repairability scale as 4/10 with 10 being the easiest to repair and 1 being the hardest. This is only slightly better than the nearly impossible-to-service iPad series.

I can’t help but wonder each time I see one of these tear downs of a new gadget if they’re able to put it back together so it works again.

[via iFixit]

iFixit’s been on something of an Apple tear lately — just a day after ripping into the barely-repairable new 13-inch MacBook Pro (not to mention the new nano and touch), the site has gotten its hands on — and into — the new Mac Mini. Unlike like the shiny new notebook, however, the diminutive desktop was apparently a pleasure to open up and put back together again, scoring an eight out of 10 on the repairability front and altogether forgoing the site’s use of adorable kittens. The Mini gets good marks for upgradable RAM and drives and a general lack of glue and proprietary screws. Click on through the source link below to see the Intel 2.5 GHz dual-core i5 in all its glory.

Filed under: Desktops

iFixit opens up new Mac Mini, has no trouble putting it all back together again originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Oct 2012 08:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You don’t have to build custom motherboards and source specialty components to build a sleek all-in-one PC. At least not anymore, thanks to Intel’s Thin Mini-ITX platform, which it debuted roughly a year ago at Computex. The main board is the same footprint as Mini-ITX (that’s a 6.7-inch square), but it calls for a much shallower construction — with horizontally stacked RAM and a shorter port cluster to keep the whole thing under an inch tall. To maintain its sleek physique, Intel pairs the desktop-class Core processor at the heart with a laptop-style heatsink and fan. It’s a pretty interesting standard from Chipzilla, which Tech Report ripped into, peeling back all it’s layers like a silicon onion. The layout of all the essential jacks does pose a bit of an issue once the whole thing is set up, but its hard not to be impressed by the elegance and simplicity of the system. To see the whole thing torn down, then reassembled inside the chassis of an LCD panel, hit up the source link.

Filed under: Desktops

Intel’s Thin Mini-ITX platform gets stuffed inside a monitor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 08:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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