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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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As sure as night follows day, and a greasy, carbohydrate-laden breakfast follows a drunken night out, so iFixit has followed the launch of Microsoft’s new Kinect by tearing one apart and photographing the metal and plastic cadaver.

The Kinect, which went on sale yesterday, is a controller-free controller for the Xbox 360. It sits atop your TV and beams infra-red into the room with its projector, and then uses cameras to track where you, your face and your limbs are, allowing you to control the on-screen action.

So, what’s inside? First, the whole sensor-bar sits on a motorized base so it can follow you around (creepy). This contains some crappy plastic gears which will doubtless wear down soon enough. On the other hand, if you have a games-room big enough that the Kinect actually needs to swivel, you can probably afford regular replacements.

The circuit-board is split into three parts, stacked up to it in the log, narrow Kinect, and the the cameras peek from one side. There are two cameras, both big webcam-style autofocus models: the infrared one has a resolution of 320 x240 and the RGB camera has 640 x 480 pixels.

There are also four microphones, pointing in various directions. The Kinect calibrates to the room you are in, taking into account the way the sound bounces off walls and furniture in order to properly recognize your voice commands.

There is one oddity inside the Kinect: a fan, in a machine that consumes a mere 12 Watts. IFixit speculates that Microsoft was burned (literally?) by the dreaded and infamous Red Ring of Death on the Xbox, and is now being over-cautious. Either that or it just likes adding noise to your living room to annoy you, kind of like a physical incarnation of the hated Clippy.

Microsoft Kinect Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]

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Source:wired.com

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Our buddies at iFixit took their screwdrivers to a brand-new, 11-inch MacBook Air, and quickly reduced it to its component parts.

Quickly, that is, once they found a way past Apple’s unusual five-point Torx screws, which seem to be designed with one purpose in mind: To keep you out.

Apple uses very unusual five-point Torx screws throughout the MacBook Air, starting with the screws holding the bottom case cover on and extending to the screw used to hold this flash memory board onto the logic board. iFixit’s crew had to file down a couple of Phillips screwdrivers to get inside.

That “keep out” mentality extends to the rest of the MacBook Air’s interior, it appears, with a host of beautifully-designed, carefully-engineered parts that are in principle removable, but in practice almost entirely non-upgradeable.

For instance, the 64GB flash drive that stands in place of a hard drive in this system “would be easily user-replaceable,” notes iFixit, if you ignored the Torx screws.

Also, it’s a completely custom part, meaning there’s no way to order a replacement. Flash drive fried? Your only alternative will be to go through Apple support.

Same goes for the 2GB of RAM or really any of the other components.

It’s an impressive feat of engineering, but, we have to conclude, not one that invites maintenance, upgrades, or hacks and mods by the customer.

For the full disassembly, including details about which parts go where, see iFixit’s MacBook Air 11-inch model teardown.

Photos courtesy iFixit.

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With a blast from a heat gun and a quick twist of a plastic spudger, the iFixit team found themselves inside the new, slim iPod Touch. First, the question you’re all asking: how much RAM does it have? The new Touch has just 256MB, the same as the iPad and half that of the iPhone’s 512MB. That means a lot less can be held in memory at once, which in turn means that any apps running in the background will wink out of life much quicker.

The super-slim body is the reason the Touch has such a crappy camera: the iPhone’s 5MP cam is just too big to fit. There are some additions to the case, though: the Touch now has a real speaker-grill, presumably to make FaceTime calling possible, and it loses the little plastic RF window on the back which used to let the Wi-Fi in and out. Now the antenna is near the glass panel.

The vibrator, which was revealed in FCC photographs and also pimped as a FaceTime alert on Apple’s own site, has disappeared like an out-of-favor politician from a Stalin-era photo. My guess is that it was pulled to keep the price down to $229 in the base model.

The other big change is of course the retina-display, which quadruples the number of pixels on the screen. Right now it is unknown whether it shares IPS (in-plane-switching) tech with the other iDevices and recent iMacs. IPS is what gives a screen an almost 180-degree viewing-angle.

It looks like Apple has squeezed a lot inside, while simultaneously boosting battery-life and making the sliver of a iPod even thinner. I have a perfectly good last-gen Touch but, dammit, now I want one of these.

iPod Touch 4th Generation Teardown [iFixit]

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Dells Android-powered Streak is an intriguing device. Billed as a tablet but priced and sold like a phone, the Streak has more in common with the HTC Evo and Droid X than it does with the iPad.

Teardown specialists iFixit decided to drill into the Streak to see what its internals look like.

Dell has designed the device so that a mechanical engineering degree is not required for a successful disassembly, says iFixit, which was able to reverse engineer the assembly process within minutes.

The Streak’s 5-inch LCD screen has a layer called ‘Gorilla Glass’ on top that is scratch resistant and durable. The LCD is bonded to the front panel glass to increase the strength of the device, as well as the sensitivity of the capacitive touch panel. But that is also likely to increase the cost of fixing the device if you break just the glass.

The front panel’s construction means the device should be able to withstand drops from above waist height, says iFixit.

The 1530 mAh battery on the Streak is easily replaceable and is covered with a sheet of steel, rather than plastic, to decrease its overall thickness.

Streak has a second 2 GB microSD card near the top of the motherboard that holds system and applications files.

The “C”-shaped motherboard of the device comes out easily after disconnecting some cables, says iFixit, and all components are attached to this motherboard.

Overall, the Streak rates high for the ease with which its battery can be replaced and the use of standard connectors for the cables.

But the real panel feels cheap, says iFixit, and deforms easily for a device that costs nearly $600.

Story continues.