Gadgetory

stays at CES I'm Jason Heiner editor-in-chief of techrepublic and with me I've got my longtime partner in crime bill detwiler managing editor and the man who likes to take things apart so today we're gonna crack open the Apple pencil right bill that's right so if you haven't seen this already this is the must-have accessory for the ipad pro this is Apple's a very large ipad here and this pencil is a really unique among styluses what it allows you to do is it allows you to draw on hoops it allows you to draw on the iPad if I could if it will work pick your tip yep so see like that and it has some interesting sensors inside that allowed to detect the angle with which you're painting allow you to take the pressure which which you're using so it makes small light lines or really thick dark lines and there's a lot of technology inside this that actually makes it function so what we want to do is we want to actually show you guys what's inside and how it works so you remarkable piece of technology I mean when we got one in right our multimedia editor Aaron Carson who's in the audience crying right now because we're about to crack it open it was a it was something that she picked it up but she unlike you and I can actually draw and and quickly was very impressed with the technology cause it's in the pencil it's it's a unique stylist um and one that works really well if you have an iPad pro you'd probably need one of these yes so let's get cracking since we have a little out of time now i do want to forewarn everyone normally when i take things apart we try to take them apart in a way we can put them back together again in working order i don't like to destroy my gadgets I can't do that with the Apple pencil this is not made to be taken apart the it is a sealed container there are several layers as I'll show you inside this so I'm going to destroy this pencil as I take it apart so if you're not ok with that you know hide your eyes but it should be fun also there's no way to do this without cutting inside of the play pestic so I've got a handy vice here to hold a pencil we've got a handy rotary cutting tool in a diamond wheel that we're going to use to slice through the plastic and the metal inside and we have some safety gear too usually I don't need safety gear when we do our cracking open yeah but this time we've got a few safety glasses for Jason and I I've got some safety gloves that will use when we start cutting this thing open and we have Katie over here with the fire extinguisher ready to go we will probably get a few sparks a little bit of smoke from the plastic but we shouldn't have a fire alright so let's let's go ahead and let's get cutting so the first thing that we'll do is we'll remove the tip of the Apple pencil which is actually made to be removed inside the tip there's actually a small piece of metal which interacts with this part of the pencil here which is a sensor which allows you to detect the pressure it also helps the detecting the angle which of how the pencil is held against the screen will also remove the cap now these are both made to come off the cap has the lightning connector and with that that's pretty much all that you can actually disassemble yourself with the Apple pencil and it actually does come with a replacement tip for when you wear that one out so we'll go ahead and wear them we're going to put this in the vise and now we're going to oops add in our studio at techrepublic we have one an even larger one than this but you rarely have to use this bill right you don't use this hard with you I mean one of the reasons that you crack things open is to to learn about what's inside to learn about the design of these devices and also to talk to our audience about if they are having to repair them and put them back together so most of the things that you crack open I can count all we've been doing these since 2006 I can count on one hand the number of things you've actually broken over the years and made unusable this will be the exception here this will be the exceptions a second one you did do one of these already and they can see the gallery a full gallery of photos on techrepublic of all this the process of cracking this open all right so let's go we've got a diamond wheel here and we've got our rotary jewel we'll see how we can do here now I'm gonna do my best not to cut through the battery there's a very small lithium-ion battery inside this but it should be okay you could set that in town you could actually get some sparks or flames right if you hit the battery yeah we could actually but it's so low voltage it has such a small capacity that it shouldn't be too much of a problem there's also adhesive in here and normally I would bring a heat gun and try to heat the adhesive up we just I'm just going to cut through it and do our best to peel it apart very good very good you can see I'm doing I'm be very careful not to cut through try to cut not cut through the interior metal component yeah if you are inclined to do some of these dis assemblies on your own there are a couple things to keep in mind one be very patient you have to be very very patient bill is incredibly patient with these things if this was me you know when it comes to things like this I tend to want to force it you know if it's not coming if it's not working I want to force it and what happens is you that's how you break something and then it becomes a you know worthless unrepairable so you have to be very patient don't force things and you know in this case you should be pretty dexterous right you should be pretty good with your hands bill kind of has the hands of a surgeon he has very steady hands and he he is very light on in the touch with these things you can see he's being very light with the touch just bare just barely getting through this thing so if you want to do these on your own we recommend most people don't you know we do these so you don't have to but if you do want to those are the two most important things don't you agree Bell oh definitely and now so what I've done is I've actually cut through each side of the plastic housing and I'm going to do my best to peel off the plastic housing here and we have an array of tools that we use when we crack these things open some of them small we have plastic prying tools these are called spud jerz we have pliers we have wire sniffs oh you can kind of hear it kind of back there a little bit work our way around the adhesive you see this thing is going to be completely toast going to show you guys this here again you can go to techrepublic com and see a full gallery of all this in action when bill did the original cracking no business he took photos of each step which you typically do on all of yours you take a photo of every step of every potential pitfall if you were taking this apart and you also learn a lot about these devices what do you learn you know when you do these cracking open well one other one of the reasons we do this is a couple things to learn their weak points to learn how they might fail in the future so that people can learn better how to support them how to take care of them so if people come to them and they ask them hey look I've got this device is it a good device is it rugged is it sturdy is it durable we also like to learn how technology of alls over time and by looking at the inside of the devices we can see the chips we can see how they're made and we can see what manufacturers are doing yeah when the you know when they're developing new products so as you can see I've got the plastic off of this the shell and there's a second metal shell inside of this so what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we're going to have to cut through that also there's no way I tried I really did the first time I did this I tried to remove the interior without cutting through the metal but there was just no way to do it that's why you get the diamond that's why i use the diamond wheel too there's also extremely small try wing screws or that are that are used inside the pencil now why Apple put screws inside a device that was never meant to be taken apart I have no clue it's extremely frustrating so I'm going to try to get these out with one of the smallest tip screwdrivers that I have I don't know if they'll come out if they won't we're just going to cut through them okay which we can do that too Apple so one of the most frustrating devices to take apart you know they don't want you to take these apart they want they want to take them apart they want you to take them into the to the apple store they also use a lot of different size screws that's another thing that's very frustrating and throughout the years of cracking open lots of different devices including Apple devices uses many different kinds of screws so if you are trying this at home you're not going to be able to just use your normal tools you've got to have some specialized tools to crack them open like pentalobe screw drivers and things like that where can people get those if they have an interest in that online most of the tools that we get we order online and you can pick up a lot of the specialized screws need to take apart the Apple iPads and the iphones and things like that yeah this screw doesn't want to come so I'm just going to cut right through the metal anyway we're going to go ahead and driver for Apple you're going to need a pentalobe screwdriver is one of them you can take a you can do a search for that you can get places like ifixit.com cell sets of tools that are quite useful and you're good you're handy dremel can also be your best friend if you're interested in this kind of thing alright so we're doing a little bit of a spark here but it shouldn't push for my Lucy got your glasses on all right so there we move here we go now we're talking you guys see can you guys see the sparks there so another thing that you know to keep in mind with these cracking open is that we try to do the devices that are most in demand that that are the things that are most common and that especially business users professionals are most likely to use because of course techrepublic a sister side of cnet focuses on the technology that people use for work so you can see all kinds of devices that bill has cracked open from iPads to the Microsoft Surface to all kinds of different phones and then every once in a while we do some fun things as well things like a connected soccer ball that has lots of sensors and processors in it surprisingly what are some of the other fun things that you've done recently bill I would have we done we've done the world we've done the bebop parity Bop drone we've done a the new Amazon Mecca fire tablet lying on the Amazon echo which is a lot of fun we're gonna cut through the other side of this alright more sparks on the way I'm doing my best not to cut through the circuit boards that are inside not because we're going to be able to save them and use them for anything because I want to show them to you now I am also doing my best not to cut through the battery that's on the inside of this again if you hit the battery with something like this that's when you really could set it on fire potentially so you have to be careful again if you you can kind of see that bills applying a really light touch to this and that's one of the most important things with this kind of thing is having a light touch don't force it you know it's easier to go back and do something a second time that it is to completely destroy the device if you're if you're too rough with it unlike this hands of the surgeon like I said hands so you can also find cracking open bill does videos of these cracking opens as well that you'll find on cnet he does a special version of the cracking opens that are in the cnet magazine you can find the cnet magazines around the booth for those of you in the live audience and you can also subscribe to see that magazine but bill does one of these for each of the cnet magazines as well where it takes a bunch of these photos and shows you them in the print magazine and then on techrepublic com you can find the full complement of photos often as many is you know 40 or 50 photos you'll do for a lot of these right but we try to show people the process and then also show them the hardware inside yeah alright so we can hear the metal cracking apart here we're going to try to bend it as best we can this thing is really toast at this point it's a this is this is one of the more difficult devices that we actually cracked open this year yeah we spent um probably I mean well you can see how long it's taken me about 30 minutes or so to get through the whole thing to cut a little bit more and a lot of times you know I talked about the patience while this thing really is sparking oops hey look it's there he goes got a little battery no check it out it smells like burnt popcorn up here now oh so I'm glad that actually we can see this because um because it does show the danger of doing this shuttle blow smoke and how careful you have to be I don't think it's the actual battery yeah yeah circuit so um earlier we cracked open one of the hoverboards you know the hoverboards that don't actually hover that have been going up in flames lately we cracked one of those open it I think everybody was hoping that a little bit we would see a few sparks or maybe some flames none for that but on the Apple pencil the the battery did give us a little bit of smoke and some sparks there if I can pull the metal off here all right come on so again specialized tools lite touch patients those are the things it takes to do this kind of thing we also learn a lot about the the design of these products when we do these things I remember a product that bill from a very popular vendor bill had cracked open one time and he you know said come take a look at this and he showed me and really inside it was a mess like the wires were were all over the place there was tape taping things down and uh and it told us a lot that that product was really rushed to market and the design was a bit haphazard this was one of the tablets one famous tablets and then on the other end I've seen bill you know number times bill you've talked about the fact that devices from vendors especially not surprisingly like Samsung and Apple on the inside the design is often just as detailed as it is on the outside that it does help show the the high quality of those devices and the fact that you know that they have engineering culture that is very serious about about their design yeah so what I'm going to show you guys here is now that we've got inside the pencil although it's very difficult to see there is so much tiny tech inside of you that is it's really surprising it's one of the smallest circuit boards that I've actually ever seen here inside the pencil it's got a I'll try to explain the different parts here this is the Lightning connector up here they're antennas for the Bluetooth a transmission back from the pencil back to the iPad there's a battery this is the very small lithium ion battery it does look it does look like that I nicked it there and that was what was causing the smoke yeah and then there's two circuit boards these are circuit boards that are actually sandwiched together this is another arm cortex aleve it's an m3 processor in there made by st micro then down in here are the sensors for the tip that help determine its angle against the face of the ipad pro and in the pressure that you're applying to the tip of it too so there's really you know you can see there's two different metal shells there's a whole other metal shell in here I'm gonna see if I can cut through you guys want to see if I can cut through the other side to let me keep going okay well I think what they're telling us that we have to wrap up here in a minute I'll have a whole lot of time so you can't anyway all the photos yet you did take this apart down to all the very bare details you can see all the photos that techrepublic dot-coms right yeah they can see all the photos there in a whole video of the process of me actually cutting both sides off and taking it completely apart