while we wait for apple's shiny new
macbook pros we're looking at the apple
watch series 7.
it gets a fancy new display with teeny
tiny bezels and
wait that's basically it
they announced this thing without a
release date which means it likely
wasn't ready in time for the big iphone
keynote something doesn't make sense
but we were so curious about the delay
that we called in some backup for this
teardown everyone welcome our good
friend and ex-apple engineer tobias
hello thanks for having me taylor it's
great to have you he's now working at
instrumental where they help electronics
brands accelerate the development of new
products and avoid delays like the
delays that might have kept this apple
watch from being released with the
iphones some of you might remember
tobias from the iphone 13 live stream
but for those who don't tobias why don't
you give us a quick 30 second intro
thank you so i'm tobias i'm a mechanical
engineer i did product design back at
apple for about six years
and now at instrumental we've helped
ship seven million new products across
some of the top electronic brands
collected 80 million data points
uh from these products
and we've seen the the full gamut of
issues that cause these types of delays
and we've built this platform
specifically designed to prevent these
type of delays so we've been teasing
tobias and his instrumental friends all
weekend with footage and clips from our
apple watch teardown but now that he's
here i'm going to walk him through step
by step sort of what we did and get his
reaction and then see if together we
can't figure out what made this apple
watch come out so late and what better
way to start than with x-rays from
creative electron this 360 spin is
looking pretty similar to last year's
series six x-ray but are you seeing
anything tobias
i love being able to to reveal the
mystery with the x-ray but the the big
building blocks they really look the
same as last year i'm really excited to
to dive deeper in the display and see
what's going on there so tobias in the
past we have used a razor blade to open
these up but this year i wanted to try
something different so we put it on our
heat mat
and
left it there for a little while and
then we used a suction cup to pull it
apart and it actually worked really well
yeah so you're actually on the right
track here there's a few keys when it
comes to opening up these types of
devices uh heat and suction are really
the two components makes sense the
things to keep in mind
i'd say four key components one like you
have is fixturing the device from the
band slots to hold it in place
two is applying the heat you've got a
pad across the whole device ideally you
want localized heat right around the
display edges so you're not damaging
anything else and i'm sure apple has a
device that does just that right you can
you can design one if you really want it
and then the the last one is actually
when you're removing the display to make
sure it only pops off x number of
millimeters so you don't rip off all
those display cables yes so the series
7's main feature is a bigger display can
you tell me about maybe how that might
have been hard for them to make or pull
off
yeah well when we first broached this
topic my immediate suspicion
was that the display was at the root
cause of some of these delays
historically the display is one of the
most complex both assembly processes and
supply chains yeah extremely delicate
and susceptible to damage either during
the assembly or a drop event uh or other
shock event yeah
and so
with the series seven what they've done
is
increase the display size and shrink the
bezels
do you know if i mean obviously
shrinking bezels is a difficult task can
you tell me a little bit more about that
yeah i think if we look at the back of
the displays here between the series 6
and the series 7
there's a few immediate differences that
you'll notice
looking at the back of the display the
border size is typically constrained by
both the touch flex exiting out the top
and wrapping around and then the oled
flex bending around at the bottom
and what you can see on the new series
seven
is they removed the touch flux on the
top
and consolidated both the touch and the
display signals down at the bottom i see
so this is similar to what we saw on the
iphone 13 pro
where it's now integrated together
and lastly they've added on this plastic
frame
that helps with structural support and
allows them to actually shrink the
borders down to this new narrower size
and because of the inherent complexities
in the display supply chains
combined with this radically new display
design i'm fairly certain that this was
the cause of the apple watch delays so
in on a design team
when you have a deadline like this and
you're trying to get the product out and
you are radically changing the design of
this component
what are some things that you do to
overcome a challenge like that where you
have a deadline
but you're doing so many of these
changes yeah typically it's a very
manual brute forced trial and error
process
design teams will iterate they'll
evaluate new designs build them see how
they perform
extremely time consuming wastes a lot of
man-hours as well as materials because
they're throwing away every single
device that failed or every iteration
that fails right yeah it's it's
extremely time inefficient yeah
and teams now that are using
instrumental
are able to better leverage the data of
the devices that they're already
building
to make faster decisions
fix problems faster and ultimately avoid
delays like these cool nice little
instrumental plug there
all right back to disassembly for a sec
compared to the s6 display the removal
process is the same disconnect two zip
connectors and unstick their cables the
s6 display here actually looks more
complicated like you mentioned it's
connected at the top for the touch panel
on the bottom for the oled panel and
apart from that it's got quite a bit
more shielding
the series 7 display is also quite a bit
thicker which contributes to that
increased durability this watch offers
but if you actually look closer at the
new series 7 display a lot of this
thickness is coming from this added
plastic frame around the exterior okay
so we were actually able to pretty
cleanly separate the oled panel and that
plastic frame from the glass here and
what we found was you can see here
completely separate oled plus plastic
frame
and the glass itself actually has a
redesigned geometry it's flat on the
back
versus the previous series 6 actually
had a cavity on the inside yes the
display was laminated
and this likely increases the the
robustness because it's easier to
machine off the back yeah
and makes it less susceptible to
cracking and probably cheaper to
manufacture as well absolutely so yeah
another design change that adds
complexity to this component making it a
likely candidate for the hold up moving
on from the display removing the battery
still requires some close quarters
prying but the adhesive is still mild
enough that you can lift up the battery
without deforming it the smaller 41
millimeter battery still has a nice
metal pouch to keep it safe both s7
batteries get a small watt hour increase
from their s6 counterparts though that
doesn't translate to any increase in
battery life here i know this was after
time but do you have any idea why only
the smaller apple watches get this
battery with the metal pouch it's it's
likely that this metal pouch was a new
technology that was introduced uh
potentially allowing them to to pack
more energy density into a smaller form
factor okay which may have been required
because of the overall design
constraints of the smaller watch yeah
and there was probably an increased
price
for for this new technology so they
sprung for it on the smaller watch but
it didn't quite justify it on the larger
model i guess that makes sense it's also
great for disassembly but i'm sure
that's not what they were considering at
the time beyond the battery the changes
are small but impactful pulling the
taptic engine and speakers out requires
less fiddling with tiny brackets and it
seems in general like the team took some
time to rethink the way everything fits
together in here
notably the speaker mesh is quite
different from the series 6. the old
mesh looks tighter like it would be more
resistant to dust ingress but the
opposite is supposed to be true
any thoughts on this device can you tell
us how devices like this are sort of
tested for ingers protection
it's it's interesting really it's the
water tests the water seal tests
that drive the design and are the
harshest tests for these devices and
because they're orders of magnitude more
difficult to water seal than dust seal
that's really the deciding factor in
most of these design decisions and so i
think the changes that we're seeing in
the speaker
and the changes to the dust rating may
just be some updates in how they
actually document this uh and not
actually signify any serious design
changes that makes sense
next out was the s7 package which
doesn't house a new processor but might
have something else interesting on the
inside one of the few external changes
to this watch was the removal of the
diagnostic port hidden in the watchband
groove the rumor is there's a new 60
gigahertz wireless module probably
hidden in this s7 package that together
with the proprietary dock allows them to
do wireless diagnostics i'm actually
shocked that they removed the only
physical diagnostic port i'm not sure
this was this was the one access point
during both assembly testing
to to load on software and also to debug
afterwards
so if it's so important even during the
assembly process
why do you think they removed it
i've i've got a couple thoughts uh
removing ingress points is is always a
plus i don't think this was the most
critical one but it's always
a little bit better
uh just removing overall assembly
complexity saving a little bit of space
apple also has a pretty long history of
testing technologies in the apple watch
and then moving them over to iphone so
this could be a sign of a portless
iphone coming soon finally the sensor
array pops free of the aluminum case so
tobias i know that this was part of your
work at apple can you tell us just maybe
one or two interesting facts about this
sensor array i know that these things
are super complicated so maybe just just
go off
there's there's a lot of fun stuff
happening in the back sensor right here
a few of the most complex features the
ones that i remember most fondly
these four
fresnel lenses
which are housing the leds underneath
which shine out the light for the heart
rate sensor yeah
these are actually doing double duty the
purpose here
is not only to direct the light out to
better optimize the light path but also
it's cosmetic so it obscures the
components underneath which really
really you know it makes it stand out
compared to some of the other wearables
very accurately very apple
and in addition to the heart rate sensor
we've also got the ecg sensor
built in here uh both on the back and on
the crown
and one of the really interesting
uh design constraints that we had
was actually electrical signals
from either wires in the wall or
different different machinery it can
actually couple in
through the air into your body and gives
very very low levels of noise
during these ecg readings
and so the proximity to some of this
equipment had to be taken into account
as as part of the design requirements
and so how how did you design around
that is that why there are two
electrodes on the back
there are multiple electrodes that allow
for a certain path for that noise to be
taken so it doesn't interfere with some
of the other signals got it very cool
and that is a wrap on our disassembly i
am pretty impressed by all the changes
that the design team has made to this
display
and honestly that seems like the only
candidate to me
for a reason for the delays
it's it's got to be the display with
this completely new integrated touch
into the oled panel
the redesigned plastic frame around the
outside massive changes there and not a
lot of other significant architectural
changes yeah and then the end result
might just seem like oh a slightly
bigger display but
really having tobias here has helped us
understand that there are a lot of
changes that go on behind the scenes to
make a little change like that happen so
that's really cool a huge thank you to
tobias for joining us today it's been a
real pleasure to have you thanks for
having me it's been a blast if anyone
wants to learn more about instrumental
and the work they do to accelerate
product development and save time and
materials during the production of
devices like these you can visit the
link in the video description or you can
click the on-screen card right now
and we actually have a dedicated guide
for engineering builds it's the evt dvt
pbt white paper great name
it goes in depth on what the causes are
for these scheduled delays best
practices and other engineering
workflows you can check that out in the
description below as well before we
leave let's give this watch a score
tobias would you like to do the honors
happily this apple watch series 7 earns
a 6 out of 10 on the ifixit
repairability score
you