Gadgetory

welcome to cracking open I'm Jason Heiner with we have got bill Detweiler our cracking open experts we've been doing cracking opens for over a decade on tech republic and we're here with our sister site CNET talking about the Apple home pod today so bill this device has been anticipated for quite some time is now available and as always we do with new technologies we're gonna break it apart see what's inside and see what we can learn about it and what we can share with all of our viewers yeah yeah tell me what you're gonna do with this one you know just like we did with the Alexa or the echo M and we've done with other smart tech you know it's really interesting to take these things apart and see all the chips all the technology that's packed inside these devices that actually make them smart so more than just a regular speaker right and so with the home pod where we're gonna start is we're actually gonna go through the bottom right here now this is the rubber silicone ring that people might have heard so much about in the news that leaves as Apple calls that our Apple to scraps I think a light mark on some wood furniture or a light ring but we're gonna remove that here you know it's not something probably the average user should do at home but for our purposes that's where we're gonna start so we do it so you don't have to that's right now to do this these rings are usually held on with an adhesive so we're gonna use our handy heat gun here a little bit of a low setting to try and heat up the glue and then we're just gonna pry the rubber ring off and that's gonna be our point of entry so this device of course has been long anticipated it was delayed but it is finally here and there is a lot of interest in it you know people who are our Apple fans Apple users have been waiting for a device like this of course Siri came out before Alexa but has not made as much progress in AI and natural language processing we see some of the competitors which we're going to talk about through that we have the home pod and the Sonos one and we have Google's home max which are all competitors up to this device bill what is it about this device that's that's driving a lot of interest why is it that there are people buying this and that are people obviously watching that are interested in learning more about why they might want to get this device yeah so if you have one of if you're already in the Apple ecosystem then this device sort of fits within that ecosystem you know very well right and that's and it also sounds really good it's it's a good quality speaker especially when it comes to bags they don't really want the average person you only get this apart so that's why we're doing it so that you can see what's in there and we can learn a little bit um this thing has a four inch woofer which is near the top as well as seven tweeters so this is a pretty serious speaker and that's why it costs so much this is the high end of the the speaker category in in typical Apple fashion so you can kind of see I've got one of the screws out which was a Torx t5 screw now we're taking out these there's about one two three four five oh there's another one hidden under the when you're cracking these devices open that's what's really kind of interesting here you don't know what you're gonna encounter yeah and a lot of the times because people don't want you to take the manufacturers don't want you to take these apart then you have to sort of find and learn as you go you know sometimes you other people have cracked him open online or you can do some research a lot of times when you're doing these devices you just sort of go along and see what you can find and what we're doing here is you know it's kind of hard to to see and this is the part that can be kind of frustrating when we're taking these things apart yeah is that you know there are screws attached to this plastic ring at the bottom I don't know how many exactly screws there are or how you know sometimes how the screws are configured and so you kind of have to work your way around work your way in the device so what I'm trying to do is we have a variety of tools that we use these are little metal plastic picks we use things Ledger's we do our best not to damage the devices I don't know if we're gonna do that on this one here because you know we again it it's made to be taken apart and repaired but by professional and not a a repair facility and not really by the end-user yeah you've been doing these for a long time yeah you know 99% of the devices we crack open we put back together again and still use his bill kind of has the mind of an engineer and they try surgeon you know so you know part of that is patience you're you're very patient when you are doing a device like this and if you are getting into one of your own devices you have to be really patient you can't push it you can't force it that's when you're gonna break something you're gonna break a knob you're gonna break a connector that you need to to get something back together and so we found here and this is kind of those unique situation we have a hold this to the camera so everybody can see what we found is basically that this plastic ring here once I've removed the screws from the center it's it's held in place not just with adhesive but it's also held in place by the outside cover okay now we're gonna try and remove the cover without cutting it I don't know if we're gonna be successful in that but we're gonna give it a shot all right that's the one part you know if I had to cut this you know it wouldn't you know I wouldn't be able to replace that very easily I wouldn't be able to put that back on so I'm gonna pry this off of this little metal tool here and this should come off if I can let's see here work our way around there we go oh no now this is a little so we can see here another little plastic ring more adhesive our favorite things when you take these apart you can see the adhesive right here that's always a pain to deal with you know it's funny old when we first started cracking things all our our we've started cracking things open we we didn't really see a lot of adhesive we see how more mechanical connection we saw screws when apps tab especially on mobile phones as the devices have gotten thinner we see and as people wanted more water resistance more dust resistance we've seen a increased use in adhesives which makes taking them apart at least in our opinion a lot harder yeah and that's the the heat gun and sort of trying to be more careful now we we've gotten the bass off we've gotten the internal little bass off what I don't see or any other screws we're gonna try and attack this from the top now we're gonna try and move this plastic piece here see if there's any more please it's important to know this is a touchscreen up here this is where your operating Siri and working with Siri and so you know this is something you're gonna we're gonna be real careful with that and try not to damage it we don't see and this is why I said we're trying to remove this without cutting it this is like a sock almost on the out is your hope that you're gonna be able to peel it we're gonna try now that we've got the bottom off we're gonna try to take the top off and keep going so you mentioned the microphones that that might be microphones at the bottom that is one of the things that this device has done well in in early tests from schema and and others as well this has a very good mic system so Siri sometimes even it will miss hear you or won't hear you if you're too far away this device has very sensitive microphone system and so that the base and the room filling sound and the good microphone system are are one of the benefits of this device especially versus of the Sonos one not a very good mic system in the soilless one but this is an excellent sound system not quite as good as this but it's also less you can get two of these basically for the price of one of these and not as good of a mic system but it has good sound much less expensive and it is like the speaker system so we had a little bit of a yeah we had a little bit of a damage here so that this is the danger whenever you take things apart so yeah we were really trying to take this part without damaging the sock here without cutting it and unfortunately I had my heat gun and this is why sometimes we use a hairdryer instead of a heat gun I think you've done for the video is a little faster and to keep this video under an hour we just have to pull with a little more heat and it's a little more dangerous right and so we have melted a little bit of the cover here and we're still gonna try and heat this up I'm still gonna try and remove this but yeah the cover is probably a lost cause at this point battle bar yeah it's just a battle scar here that will have to live with learning experience again we do this so you don't have to with your home pod so so bill touch screen makes this definitely more treacherous be right because there's gonna be more electronics there's any more wires attached to the bottom of this and that's gonna make it more of a challenge right it is and so that's why that's what we use the heat that's why we use these small devices you know when we first started cracking like this this is sort of a modified guitar pick right and we can slide this plastic device in here and try to slide it through the glue yeah um and not crack this if I order to take one these metal devices and not just sort of shove it in there the guitar picks tend to work pretty well for this because they are flexible they're plastic and usually don't scratch the underlying you know they won't scratch the underlying components and they can cut through the adhesive you can see this is pretty strong stuff yeah thus the I'm pushing pretty hard to get through here that's what the heat does and these are really the holes then we used to have oh yeah right so early on we started we used anything that we could we used razor blades we use kitchen knives we use on the on the first iPhone that we did I think I use the kitchen knife right yeah now we've gotten a little bit more sophistication to there's a great old photo out there on the Internet of when we've cracked open the first iPad you remember in that there are there's like Swiss Army knives stuck in the side there's spatulas there's all kinds of things that are all stuck in at once as we're trying to pry that screen off of the back casing all right let's see how let's see what we can do this one's being difficult yeah it's being a little tougher than normal but that's okay we expect it to be all right so we're finally sort of through the top of this we've heated the adhesive enough and I've kind of worked my way around and so we're hopefully we're gonna be able to lift this off now I really have tried to do this you know if you get impatient you can just pull this back right here I suspect this was this this part here would just snap off you don't want to do that but we also know because this is a an LCD or a screen of some type right there's going to be a connector there's gonna be a cord it's gonna be something connected to it I really don't want to take a metal tool like this go all the way around without kind of knowing where that cord is or trying to at least avoid it somewhat yeah well as destroying the the technology right yeah yeah yeah and it looks like the light actually this may just be a cover that the light shines through I might even have to worry about that but that's what you don't know you really don't necessarily know until you get in here what you're gonna find yep now let's talk about Siri a little bit because Siri is what's powering this device and Siri really pioneered this smart smart assistant revolution but serious fallen pretty far behind it is just a cover yeah so this is actually is just a cover and it the lights are actually mounted yeah that's so you can show that off like taking this off and yeah you can see the plus and minus volume the power and then of course the the logo the Siri logo that pops up as we're talking about Siri had a nice lead in smart assistance from several years ago and they have they really lost that unfortunately so this is not a device that's gonna be you know your smart home control center that's going to be your smart assistant because it doesn't have as many third-party integrations as Alexa and it doesn't have as good of native integrations as Google assistant nor does it have the language capabilities that that Google assistant has in multiple languages so this is a pretty us-centric device and definitely sort of English centric device much more than than Google and an even Alexa so so you do have to keep that in mind with this speaker that said it is Apple's first speaker and you have to expect that they'll learn from this so we removed for these are Torx screws these were actually T 5s on the bottom I use the T ticks or t6 to remove these okay and that's another frustrating thing that you find inside these devices is that manufacturers for whatever reason like to use different sizes of screw and I'm all different for different columns especially Apple I don't know what it is if you take a part of Samsung phone if you take apart something else like that they use the same screws or they use similar screws no no no not inside an Apple device will be 15 different sizes lengths you know different head types so it really it does help with your taking these apart they have a pretty good assortment of tools to help you do that so we've got the screws out of here again I'm gonna try and pry this off and see if it's gonna pop off easily or if we're gonna have sort of more trouble underneath I'm trying to feel how much resistance is here yeah I don't see any other screws here I don't know if there's any screws under the Sirian tap there is not actually this is just a little white cap there's no hélène LED lights right there it looks like oh so I can't really see whether or not you know this plastic piece is separate from this so we're gonna try and pop this off and see what happens oh and it looks like interestingly enough there's another there so here we go so there's more adhesive down there yeah so we're again we're gonna pry this off very gently now so this is this piece of hardware right here has the Seri the LED lights yeah it had the screw holes passing through it it has the ambient what what I suspect is an ambient light sensor right yeah and the controls the you know the plus and minus can controls here for volume yeah we can see here at the back it's connected by this little really thin ribbon cable you see those a lot or we call them ribbon cables I think they're actually called flat flexible folding cables or so okay like that so okay they stop calling them ribbon cables that shows our age right old ribbon printer cables yeah so but it's connected I don't want to damage that so what I'm gonna do is be very careful there's a small gating connector right here that the cable plugs into actually should be able to pop that loose with a little bit of a metal tool here may be or it may just pull out if it actually doesn't have a gate on it I think that it does there we go there we release the gate like that and then I can pull this out well and it's gone so this is what I talked about with being able to sort of remove these parts without causing too much damage yeah so on this board now this is interesting with with these devices you see these shields here the metal shields the end of those emi RF some type of electro magnetic interference shields design protect the circuits underneath and with some devices those are actually here I'll take it with some devices these shields are actually you can pop them off the pack with other devices you can't so some manufacturers when they put these shields on they actually solder them to the boards now what's likely under their bill well so there's going to be the controllers for the LEDs there's going to be the controllers for the touch sensors is probably going to be the controller for the ambient light sensor I hate you think I know I think that's further I would suspect that's kind of further down I could be wrong I haven't looked at the chip that's under here it's possible that it's there but the only way to find out is to kind of keep going and keep getting further into the vise now we can see down here more screws right so we're gonna try our t6 see if that'll did it does yay so we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna keep taking off screws now you can kind of see we built up a little pile of screws or piles of notes we're throwing things around piles of components here's another one it's like you know 19th century clothing it's just one layer and then another layer then another layer these really are like nesting dolls right you know it's you keep going deeper and deeper now I will say this the apple homekit you know this we don't know this episode of cracking open may be like our longest episode ever you know feel like a marathon here okay but you never need these speakers are actually really complicated to take apart the echo was and this one is because you know they're more than just small devices like a phone usually you pop the top off of the thing and you can get right into it now what we've done here is we've actually and this is what really annoys me about some of these cracking opens right now I've figured out we found that there's this seam right for the cover and it's there's these couple strings here that are wrapped around some plastic pegs on this sort of on this little piece of plastic here inside the inside the speaker and if we remove these pieces of string and we pull this out you can see how this comes apart here we have this little plastic ring you know it's just a holder and I suspect and just as I suspected enough that's game let it if I hold this like this you know it's kind of like shoelaces right yeah you can pull this like this we can get a shot like that's great good shot and we can hold this Oh cut it so I won't have to cut it that's great pull the sock down there we go then we can see a magic moment there we can see the plastic frame yeah it'll just come loose like this now yeah obviously and we can remove the whole thing - totally once we actually take the speaker apart and we remove the power cord from from the speaker yeah this would just slide off that way yeah now that's also the good news is this thing's gonna go back together or go back together won't work just perfectly now one thing is else that we've noticed so this is where we first start to see the main board for the home pot okay it's good there's a port as a circuit board right here whoo and I can tell that this shield right here is not soldered to the board I'm able to pop that off okay and we're gonna be able to see the stuff underneath I believe that a eight maybe is there well yeah well we'll see what we'll see oh we can see the big subwoofer right there yep or the woofer that's orient woofer right here yep you can hear it yeah a little bit if we tap on it that's where that great bass remember this device probably the best bass of any of these speakers so if you really care about bass if you're you know into you know music with a lot of bass the bass this is probably your device you know right here it's claw and very good one thing I'm gonna do right now is in order to get this board out the board's was held in with the screws that I took out earlier but there is a another one of these flexible cables that runs down in the device this is like an what connects to the speakers or connects to some other circuitry possibly inside that we haven't seen yet it's this large flat cable here alright we're going to go ahead on this gate up right here there's a there's a gate on the back of this this lifts up and then real gently we should be able to pop that right out just like that so with that we have another circuit board so this is circuit board I think we've got this circuit board in heck who knows there's sound in there and um we also do I want to be able to take these shields off so we can statutes under underneath there we can already see one of the chips right here and outside of this we're gonna go ahead and pop these larger shields off alright to pop this one off though we're first gonna have to remove the ribbon cable there's a little bit of adhesive I don't really like pulling on the end much yeah we're gonna use another one of our guitar picks just slide it kind of under there very gently okay to go through the adhesive again I don't want to pull on this too much I don't want to like that's where you could make it look I know it looks like there's a gate on this side so we're not even gonna do that I'm gonna pull this out here and because this this metal shielding comes off yes I'm gonna open the gate there we're gonna take another little thin mat we're gonna take a metal tool okay or something equally thin we're gonna pop off this yam up this shielding here you see me and the ribbon will just come off with it and we're gonna see what's under there now this one has lots of little bitty metal tabs yeah they're being kind of frustrating that's okay okay so you just have to be patient a little metal bit a little bit at a time you know so it'll go it'll go over - it'll go back together no problem even if one of the tabs were to pop off or something like that as long as it's held back on in place yep that's no problem we're looking for that Apple a8 processor to see where that is if it's in here great it's possible it could be in this unit from the top but very likely it's in here remember the a8 that's not the latest processor that's in the iPhone it's a couple generations behind I don't see any chips so we've removed the metal shield yeah but that down there I don't see any chips yeah really you know significant chips on this side of the board this is all motherboard primarily yeah a little printed circuit board here so now we're gonna take the we're gonna take this larger one off on the back so you can see the photos of this device yeah we'll have on TechRepublic you can also if you know what some of the chips are you know sometimes they're people that watch these shows that they work at some of the companies that you know put these chips in here partnered with them then you can of course anonymously I'm leaving some message in the comments and let us know you can also use the comments to let us know if there's other things you'd like us to crack open because we're always looking for for new stuff to break into I suspect under this right here I suspect this is the okay so we're gonna take this little uh and here it is here's the a8 and here it will take this little cushion here is probably a little bit of a you don't source the thermal paste any more on these Yang's to sort of connect it but that's what this sort of pad serves and it helps protect the chip and serves as a little bit of a heatsink and so right here we can see a memory Chapel you see the a8 processor now this is one is easy to identify because it has large a8 on it yeah this one it's really hard to tell one of these is probably a Wi-Fi chip in here it's yeah just super hard to read the the markings on these but there's definitely a Wi-Fi chip in here we know there's going to be a process of audio processing chips in here because it's a big part of this yeah as well so you know here's definitely the guts of the speaker and this is what makes it actually smart so at this point if we just wanted to see what this was we can kind of stop right but I suspect what they've done is they made a calculation that looked this component is a whole is not likely to be repaired they've made the calculation that this component right here they're just going to replace this as a unit this is manufactured to be replaced so if the repair center gets it back in they're gonna have this unit they'll be able to remove all this other stuff but we Obul to remove the cover but then that'll be it that'll be it there's no other ways to do that so like we in here is just the power unit the tweeters the subwoofer and the microphone that's probably all that's left in there the only way I suspect I think this is all solid yeah only way to get to that is to break out our dremel a dremel and try that it go down the see this yeah we're gonna break out we'll break out a rotary cutter and you would cut along this side and then lift this part off and then the speaker's will come out to for our purpose what we're gonna do is we're not going to do that we've we're decide that we really want to try and put this back together and do some further testing on it yes so and we've kind of showed the most important tech that we think is inside the device and so we're gonna call it quits here and we're going to we're gonna unlike the bb-8 that we cracked open and see yes a couple years ago the little Star Wars sparrow toy yeah bb-8 we're gonna spare that to it we're gonna spare the home pod and and stop right here very good all right so you can find more photos of all the things we've cracked open in the past and more future cracking opens on TechRepublic and find videos on CNET and let us know what kind of things you'd like to see us crack open next leave us a comment in the comment section and we will look and see what kind of stuff that we will do next time alright thanks for watching see ya