Gadgetory

we've toured factories before but somehow I've never even been to what is arguably the electronics manufacturing capital of the world Shenzhen China so when oneplus offered to sponsor us behind the scenes for a close-up look at their production lines for the one plus six I couldn't resist the first line behind me here is completely focused on building the screen assembly which includes the OLED panel the digitizer and the glass front and the chassis the oneplus six uses a sandwich style construction with an aluminum mid plate and then a separate glass backplate this first station here after earpiece speaker grille installation is dedicated just to inspecting the chassis that are shipped here from Foxconn by the way don't be surprised if you buy from someone like oneplus and some of the components come from Foxconn their factories make pretty much everything but it's down to one plus to control the quality of the user experience so this guy right here is checking every single unit to ensure that it meets their standard and he's really picky so a tiny imperfection like this which is very hard for us to even capture with an 8k camera will result in this unit being sent back for a refund now the defect rate for a part like this is around 0.3 percent meaning that it's not a huge issue on the surface but think about it if a phone requires let's say six major components and each of them is bad point three percent of the time then even if everything else goes perfectly oneplus could end up building two out of every hundred of their phones with some kind of imperfection totally unacceptable next the chassis and the display assembly get fed into opposite sides of the glue applicator machine right here it uses machine vision to precisely align them then it applies a special glue and then they get left in a compression device for three hours while the glue cures once these get opened up the excess glue gets scraped away at this station here then the USB port and the vibration motor go in after which wait hold on a minute to war glue scraping stations okay so one plus is currently at a stage of production called Pvt that actually means that every single phone you see here today is going to end up recycled at some point and they will produce anywhere from hundreds to even thousands of phones during Pvt in an effort to get things streamlined before they go to mass production and so as part of this process they found out that there was a 15% chance that glue would seep out again at this stage right gear so in the future they might be able to eliminate these stations this whole thing is a constantly evolving process from here the assembled displays and Chafee's get run through a series of test patterns to ensure some basic functionality so under this station we find yet again more trays full of rejected parts with flaws both big and very very small finally some protective covers get applied and the whole thing gets carted off to storage here we're getting our first look at the rear panel as the rear camera covers and the fingerprint sensor get placed now the fingerprint sensor is going to be exposed to the user so it gets precisely aligned by machine before being pressed into place now this next station here is another great example of the growing pains that you go through with a new device you see this little sticker pad here they had to add this to the rear cover because a taller portion of the PCB runs here now they can probably revise this sort of thing in the future so this speaker might not be necessary forever but for now some extra protection seems prudent the back cover is now ready and it's actually gonna jump across the line where we'll pick up with it later on batteries get checked here and then they do get passed across the u-shaped production line leading us to the beating heart and the pretty face of every modern flagship phone the mainboard excuse me complete with snapdragon 845 processors and the rear camera which in this case is a dual 16 plus 20 megapixel affair the completed chassis and the display from before those actually join us here now it's time for some rapid-fire component installation it's basically like building a little tiny PC so we've got ambient sensor placement the front camera then at a single station right here in goes the earpiece speaker the headphone jack and a daughter board then after that we've got weight really four people it takes four people to install and cable managed to dinky little RF cables well actually yes it does because of the importance of this step these connectors in here are very fragile and the placement and these wires is imperative to the functionality of the phone after the ribbon cables go in for the daughter board right behind me this protective cover right here for it goes in almost entirely automatically now precise alignment here is critical because even though oneplus doesn't advertise it the bottom of the phone by the main loudspeaker here actually has similar waterproofing to all their flagship devices this has apparently been true since the 5 so it doesn't mean that one plus is going to warranty you if the water damage sticker turns red when you send it in but it is nice to have that little bit of peace of mind this station here is all about identifying process and supply chain issues every major component of the phone has a QR code that gets scanned into their system here and then stored onboard the phone so that oneplus can quickly track failures in the field back to the component supplier assembly line and even the QC staff that led it through then we get a quick power on test to ensure that base functionality it looks ok followed by the motherboard cover which goes on in a similar fashion to the daughter board cover remember how I promised batteries would be joining us from across the aisle here they are so they go into the phone here followed by another computerized inspection machine where my main man here is rocking the world's greatest footwear and this trippy machine that aligns the back panel with the front and then places it on these two pressors here and then this little roller doodad ensure that the back panel is fully adhered and then the finished phones get a final visual check to ensure that everything is bleh know this also includes a little wipe down in most cases so that's it we're done right so why isn't this video over well you guys remember how I promised that over a hundred people would touch one of these before it left the factory this is only like 70 ish so after software it gets loaded every device gets a special code entered into its numpad to enter testing mode and then goes through a shockingly thorough QA screening process so at stage 1 they test the flash with this little black box here then they record a video while the phone is sitting in a mechanical shaker to ensure that its image stabilization is working as expected stage 2 has testers snapping a photo for comparison against a reference image that is stored in the QA software and then stage 3 actually lifts up the phone against this little metal barrier here to ensure that the proximity sensor is working as intended Stage four checks autofocus on both cameras by moving the phone back and forth from a target while Stage five screens for dead pixels on the camera sensor or dust under the cover at Stage six every phone goes into a little mini RF chamber for GPS and Wi-Fi testing and then at Stage seven antenna operation is verified but we are far from done so one plus actually started pre-installing screen protectors on their phones to protect against shipping breakage on the oneplus X a few years ago and this has continued ever since so this goes on right here then we got to move over to the other side of the line this guy's not just chilling and listening to music he's actually making sure that the headphone jack when it's plugged in or unplugged behaves correctly and then his partner here is making sure that the RGB indicator LED and stream brightness control are functioning normally the microphone and speaker are both tested in here to ensure that they meet spec this apparently has the highest failure rate on finished devices at about one in a thousand if the speaker is misaligned or really if the device fails any of these tests it will get sent for disassembly for them to try again all right almost done here just five more stations so here both the selfie and the rear camera get checked again this time by a human for any weirdness that the automated tests might have missed a fun story oneplus actually ran into some customer complaints people thought that their phones were refurbished because they had the pictures these guys were taking in the factory on them no it's fine they just forgot to wipe them no big deal moving right over here the G sensor gets checked by this trippy little rotating table and NFC functionality is verified both normal functionality and high speed dash charging functionality are checked here and then this machine uses infrared depth sensing to ensure that the curvature of the back of the phone is to spec bringing us finally to one more visual inspection and wipe down before the finished phones are placed in protective sleeves and prepared to be sent to packaging so each one of these just to give you guys some idea of the volume here each one of these contains about 50 phones completely ready to go oh I don't know where I got this from the environmental stress room up presumably that's what that says I have no way of knowing is not as impressive to look at but it's really important so they've got a number of different chambers in here ones that are designed to rapidly increase and decrease temperature from 75 all the way to minus 40 for up to a week at a time ones that are designed to deliver very high temperatures at 95% humidity for up to 500 hours at a time and they've got this rain drop test which isn't actually running right now but we can open it up they would expect a phone under this shower for a hundred hours to function normally after a few days of dry out time dang but it's not as outright impressive as room number two where they do one meter 1.5 meter and 1 point 8 meter drop tests onto a slab of marble with a QA technician checking the phone's functionality Oh after each fall so they do each side of the phone 2 times and they accept 10% cracked screens but they expect the entire rest of the phone's functionality including the camera to remain unimpacted haha so to speak by this type of torture I mean that seems reasonable enough to me I mean most people would have to be like walking around like this with a phone on their head to drop it from 1.8 meters all the time and that one isn't even the most strenuous test in this room this tumbler right here check this out oh you hear that this guy drops up to four phones one meter in any orientation a total of a hundred and fifty times now one plus does expect some aesthetic damage here but once again more than 10 percent cracked screens means it is back to the drawing board oh that's hard to listen to we saved the best for last this is the endurance lab so in room one we found all kinds of treats this guy right here can press on the USBC and headphone jacks and remove and insert cables 10,000 times after that stress test the phone will be taken out disassembled and inspected for structural damage that could be reinforced in future designs this guy right here is a mechanical but that puts 25 kilograms of pressure onto the top of the phone a thousand times this is for careless people who keep their phone in their back pocket this one right over here this one's actually kind of depressing this is the 10 centimeter drop tester it works in conjunction with the edge tester that's over there to pick up and drop each phone 10,000 times from the back 10,000 times from the front then another 2,000 times on each edge for a total of 28,000 minor drops they expect the phones to survive this kind of treatment it's actually kind of cathartic to watch so that's pretty much it huge thank you to oneplus for sponsoring us out here to take a look at the behind the scenes production of the oneplus 6 and a big thank you to you for watching you guys dislike this video you know where that button is but if you liked it hit like get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also linked down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum which you should totally join much better