our co-founder Luke souls started this
sort of tradition of feeding the rest of
the crowd by flying to Australia for the
iPhone 3GS and ever since then I fix it
has been sending someone around the
globe for all of the new releases of
really important things planning for
tear downs is always really tough it's
usually super last-minute we watch like
the big press release thing for the the
iPhone or the Apple watch or whatever
and that will tell us when the pre-order
date is and that helps us decide how and
where we're gonna fly and we're gonna do
I'm Andrew Goldberg teardown engineer
for iFixit I'm Samantha Lionheart I do
most of the teardown photography for the
big tear downs and the guides we're in
Australia which is 17 hours ahead of our
home office isn't slow yeah the flight
itself is 15 hours and we were
travelling forward in time to Australia
so you lose two days just in the flying
time we are here to be the first people
to take apart the success and the
success plus will actually have the
phone here and be taking apart and be
totally finished with it before it
releases back home and it will also rate
it for a pair ability which means that
we'll figure out just by taking it apart
how hard it is to pick up something in
replace it how hard it's gonna be to fix
things so you can get at it get an idea
before you buy it how expensive or hard
it's gonna be to fix 180 eventually
breaks so working with people back home
from Australia it's kind of crazy it
sucks for them because they're working
until like four or five in the morning
when it's just kind of like the late
afternoon for us by the time we're done
but we're all in one chat room so we try
and coordinate all the text that's going
in there and by the time the teardown is
live we have to be really meticulous
about what text goes into the teardown
because it's gonna be seen by millions
of people and sometimes we also have
translators who are coming in so we have
to coordinate with them and find out
like the best translations for things
and make sure that we're not stepping on
each other's toes making edits yeah one
of the big issues working with the team
back home is that here in Australia or
sometimes in New Zealand the internet
it's a lot slower and we're the source
of the content we're taking the pictures
and uploading them so that means that
everyone else is waiting on us to get
the pictures up there so they can start
their analysis and start writing the
text about it and so that actually adds
a little bit more pressure as we're
taking things apart we've got to be even
faster and make sure we do it right the
first time especially because if we're
taking pictures and then moving on and
then the team finds something wrong or
something that they want another picture
of can be really hard to go back because
I may be in a half an hour or an hour
ahead or the actual pictures of the
teardown are yeah totally there's also
kind of the lag between like taking
photos and editing the photos so it's
not just like an upload speed thing
because when we take the photos I still
have to do the photoshopping so I'll be
like
or twenty photos behind even of the
actual like teardown timeline so what's
on the website isn't actually where
andrew is he's way ahead so if we do
miss something that it's kind of hard to
go back especially since we're doing to
tear downs now of like the success and
the success plus sir just me like
powering through both tear downs so
actually three years ago I flew out to
New Zealand with Luke our co-founder to
do the first head out of the iPad Mini
and we ended up getting spooked by our
own team back home in California so
after all the hours of flying and travel
and stress getting a hotel and getting
everything set up we ended up sitting in
our hotel room working on text from New
Zealand while the rest routine was doing
The Keg on back home it definitely sucks
to be scooped but that was kind of like
a while ago and nowadays I think it has
a pretty big presence online so you're
gonna if we are scooped sometimes we
still end up getting like really great
traffic so sometimes getting the device
can be pretty hard a bit of a challenge
certainly last year for the iPhone 6 and
the 6 plus we staked a lot on getting
the 6 plus early but we didn't have a
priority reservation for that so we
waited in line at the Apple Store we
took about 20 hours I think that Apple
store had about 40 iPhone 6 pluses in
stock for walk ups and every person in
front of us potluck is it was the big
hot thing and Sam had to actually find a
guy who managed to get to and buy one
off of him for a bit extra which pretty
much saved our date most people know
about us from our tear downs but we're
also a free online repair manual for
basically everything we're gonna be some
of the first people who do the repair
guides at all most devices don't even
come with repair manuals except for you
know just a few manufacturers so we have
like free repair guides free consumer
information as far as like what's
repairable and also for people who just
want to know what the newest technology
is we're a great resource for that and
it's online and it's totally free and we
just want people to be able to have
their devices last longer and if your
device last longer then it's not going
into the landfill it's going to someone
else who needs it or it's lasting water
in your
it I think this mission is to fight the
repairman you know to fix everything in
the world and if doing that means flying
17 hours into the future to do a
teardown and that's we're gonna keep on
doing