Apple doesn’t want to let you inside your iPhone, even if all you want to do is fix it.
That’s what repair company iFixit claims, at least. The company recently discovered that Apple has quietly switched the screws in the latest shipments of the iPhone 4 from a basic Phillips head to a tamper-resistant screw that you can’t remove with any screwdriver you’d buy at a hardware store. Read More…
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on January 20, 2011
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Never invite the folks at iFixit to your home. Leave them alone for just a minute and they’ll have unpacked their torx-wrenches and spudgers and be all up in your TV, laptop, iPad or whatever you foolishly left in the room with them.
Keep them in their natural habitat, though, and they’re awesome, as we can see from this teardown of the Boxee Box, the set-top box that brings all your media, and all the internet’s media, onto your home TV.
Kidding aside, we were pretty excited to see the inside of the Boxee Box, if only to find out just how the computery bits fit inside the odd-shaped case. The answer, it turns out, is “neatly”.
The truncated cube shape of the box means some clever thinking has gone into packing everything in. Circuit-boards have been made to non-standard shapes, but the actual bits and pieces are easy to get to. Everything is held in by Phillips screws, and there are standard parts, too, like the Mini PCI-E wireless card.
The Box itself is actually pretty small (as is the very clever QWERTY-backed remote), and features a glass front-panel through which the Boxee logo glows. There’s an SD-card slot for quickly loading up movies, 1GB RAM and 1GB flash storage and an Intel CE4110 processor running at 1.2GHz. This, along with many of the internals, is identical to that in the more expensive Logitech Revue Google TV box.
For a full rundown of the hardware specs and components, take a look a the iFixit gallery.
Boxee Box Teardown [iFixit]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on November 11, 2010
Sony might be playing catchup to the Wii with its “Move” motion-controller for the Playstation, but the tech packed inside makes the Wiimote look like a kids’ toy. More surprisingly, according to iFixit head-honcho Kyle Wiens, it is very easy to open up and repair.
The Move is shaped like one of those personal massagers in the Sky Mall catalog, and has a ping-pong ball perched on the end. This ball lights up in a rainbow of colors thanks to three LEDs inside, and the included detector sees the glow from atop the television. This places you in two dimensions, and different colors for different players let the box know who is who. The detector also checks the size of the globe, uses that to calculate your distance and accurately places you in 3D-space. The Wii can’t do that.
Digging deep into the bowels after removing a few Phillips screws and you find a user-replaceable battery and then a slew of high-tech components that Kyle says are more common in today’s smartphones: “a processor, accelerometer, gyroscope, Bluetooth transmitter, vibrating motor, and even a MEMS compass” sit inside and provide information to the mothership. As Kyle points out, while “it’s steep to pay $50 for a controller, it’s quite the bang for the buck.”
The best part, though? Clearly the fact that any Star Wars games from now on will be able to make the ball glow the same color as your on-screen Light Saber. Awesome.
PlayStation Move Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]
Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 20, 2010
Oh man, the iFixit crew just hopped up another step on the Stairway to Awesome. They have opened up and explored a Magnavox Odyssey 100, successor to the world’s first home games-console.
Kyle Wiens and his nerdy team are better known for flying around the globe to buy brand-new Apple products in order to tear them apart, photographing and detailing the internals for our voyeuristic techno-pleasure. The Magnavox teardown marks a week of more retro autopsies, and reveals surprising circuit designs and even some analog controls inside the 1975 console.
The case is held together with a single flathead screw, easily removed, Once inside you see not only a circuit-board but also a mess of wires and components. This, according to the know-alls at iFixit, was because Magnavox wanted to ship the console fast, and wasn’t sure that Texas Instruments would have the chips ready on time. There are also pots (potentiometers) which can be twisted by the user to adjust the positions of the on-screen goals and walls of the two built-in games, tennis and hockey.
We’re looking forward to seeing what other historical devices iFixit will be ripping open this week in celebration of its new line of game console repair manuals. I have my fingers crossed for a Vectrex, if only to see just how they managed to cram such a big wad of amazing inside.
Magnavox Odyssey 100 Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]
Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 31, 2010
