Meet the home pod! Apples entry into the smart speaker market. Not only does it
use spatial awareness to fill your room with high-quality sound but you also get
Siri to help you play that music and hopefully to help you answer some
questions. I don't have the answer to that is there something else I can help
you with. Hey Siri read my last message. It says "Kelsea I've never seen anyone party that hard. I hope you're
okay today clown face" Would you like to reply? We all know why we're really here let's tear this
thing down. How do we even start to get inside this
thing? I don't know, but let's bring some heat and start from the top and work our
way down. We heat up the touchscreen of it and it prys right up, and then we
remove some Torx screws. We'll heat up the next layer - which lets us pry
that right up and we're met with the first PCB.
I going to pull out my heat gun
to heat up the rubber foot a bit. And that lets me pull it right off and we're
met with even more torx screws. We'll take off the torx screws securing the
drawstring first and then we can go ahead and slide off the mesh.The 3d mesh
is actually really interesting it consists of a net-like layer at the top
and a bunch of tiny coils in between. This type of construction allows sound
waves to pass through the fabric with little to no reflection but it still
keeps the dust out. Four more screws hold the logic board in place so we'll take
those out and with the flick of the spudger we can lift out the logic board
and see that A8 processor. There's nine more hidden torx screws underneath all
these rubber stoppers but even with all those out we're still not any closer to
getting inside. But we'll start at one of the seems next. Heating and prying
doesn't work, our adhesive remover started melting the plastic and our
efforts at brute-force resulted in us breaking it so I guess it's time to bust
out the ultrasonic cutter. Well that was fun
but seriously messy and I'm not sure how crystal clear the sound on this home pod
will be when we put it back together but we'll let you know. There's six more
torque screws holding the woofer in place and you can feel that heavy magnet
on the back side of the woofer as you lift it out. Disconnecting the woofer
gets us our first real glimpse inside and there is still so much more left to
tear down. Six more screws hold a ring secured to the base and below that we've
got another interesting find another threaded ring. We're thinking that at
some point the homepod was able to be unscrewed to separate the woofer
component and the tweeter power supply unit but judging by the adhesive we've
been battling the threads aren't meant to be engaged by the consumer. This thing
was glued shut! Which is probably why the AppleCare
repair cost is 85% of the cost of the device itself. We're left with a pile of
boards stacked on top of each other and the first to come out is part one of a
two-part power supply which handles the ac/dc conversion, followed by the
capacitor studded outer ring. There's a small board glued to the side of the
barrel that's home to a microphone that is likely a low frequency mic that
handles the woofer calibration the home pod is also listening and adjusting the
bass level in line with other frequencies. The rest of the microphones
can be seen firmly glued around the center of the home pod all with their
own window to the outside world. Lastly we free one of the seven tightly
packed in tweeters all crowned with two golden posts that are you guessed right
delivering power to the speakers. With the homepod completely disassembled, it's
time to talk repairability the home pod scored a 1 out of 10 and
here's why. On the upside the homepod is built like a tank so durability should
not be an issue. The outer fabric mesh despite lack of seams can be peeled off
undamaged thanks to a wicked cool drawstring. Sll threaded fasteners are of
the same standard Torx variety so no annoying security screws here. Extremely
clever use of the conductive screw posts minimizes the cabling mess around
multiple stacked layers of components. But on the downside, very strong
adhesives secured the touch input cover microphone array rubber foot and most
annoyingly the main point of entry on the top of the device which otherwise
looks designed to twist off without much fuss. And even though it looks like there
ought to be a non-destructive way inside we failed to decode it without a repair
manual, your odds of success are slim. That's all for this teardown be sure to
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I'll see you next time!