teardown | Stuff-Review

Samsung Galaxy S III receives the teardown treatment

June 3, 2012 at 9:21 am

We love using our gadgets, you know when they are actually fully assembled and functioning, but we also have a bizarre affinity to watching them get torn down into dozens of separate parts giving us a glimpse of what’s inside.

The latest device to have received the teardown treatment is none other than the hero smartphone of the moment, the Samsung Galaxy S III. As usual the good folks over at iFixit did the slicing and dicing, which has revealed a number of tasty bites.
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The Fujfilm X100 is beautiful on the inside too

News

May 20, 2012 at 3:21 am

If you’ve read our review of the Fujifilm X100 digital camera you’ll know how much we love this little wonder. Well now we know how beautiful it is on the inside too.

After a fishing trip, photographer James Maher found his gear soaked in salt water in what was supposed to be a dry container. This unfortunately also included his trusty Fuji X100, which is not weather sealed, and the experience proved deadly for the camera.

So what do you do when you have a dead $1,200 camera? You take it apart of course.
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Canon 5D Mark III goes under the knife, gets its anti-aliasing filter removed in the name of sharpness

News

April 1, 2012 at 2:04 pm

Camera makers load their goods with moiré-busting anti-aliasing (AA) filters, however these low-pass filters come with a big caveat. You see they are placed in front of the camera’s sensor and work by slightly blurring the image in order to avoid moiré and aliasing effects at the cost of resolution and sharpness.

It seems that Canon has chosen a pretty strong AA for its latest full-frame shooter, the 5D Mark III, which is bad news for videographers and lovers of sharp stills. Nikon offers two versions of the competing D800, the D800E flavor has a weaker anti-aliasing filter than the standard model, but Canon fans are pretty much stuck.

Now you’d think that a weak low-pass filter leaves you at the mercy of moiré, but in reality these patterns are not as common as they are made to be and we’ve seen the benefits to resolution of a weak anti-aliasing filter in our real world review of the Fujifilm X100 here.
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No, Apple didn’t make a battery tech breakthrough in the iPad 3; it just stuck more of it inside

News

March 16, 2012 at 4:03 am

Some of the initial coverage on the new 3rd generation iPad suggested that Apple somehow increased the power density of the Lithium-ion battery cells inside the new iPad in order to achieve the jump from 25Whr, in the iPad 2, to 43Whr — that’s more than a 70% increase in battery capacity. The reasoning behind this was that while there was this huge increase in battery capacity the new iPad is only very slightly thicker (just 0.6mm) and heavier than the iPad 2.

Now, the iPad 2 was practically all battery already, so somehow it made sense that Apple had magically created a new battery technology without anyone catching wind on it.

That would be some awesome news for the entire consumer electronics industry and you know how much we deplore mobile devices that don’t offer full-day battery life and how we are always on the lookout on ways to keep us powered on the go. However, if you knew anything about the evolution of battery technology you’d know how slowly and incrementally power density has improved.
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The new iPad goes under the scalpel, teardown reveals Samsung retina LCD

News

March 15, 2012 at 1:26 pm

The guys at iFixit are really committed to what they do, and what they do is dissect all your favorite gadgets piece by piece and document every step of the way. Well, the 3rd generation iPad may not be out yet but the iFixit crew managed to grab one from a store in Australia and promptly brought it in for surgery.

First task was to separate the new stunning retina display from the rest of the iPad’s body and here we get the first revelation. The screen is probably made by Samsung rather than LG as it was initially rumored.
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MacBook Air misses half its thunder, still awesomely hot

News

August 1, 2011 at 11:16 am

What you see above are the innards — that is the motherboard — of the latest 2011 MacBook Air, dissected and displayed with love and care from the folks at iFixit.

A careful examination of the Thunderbolt controller chip at the top right has revealed that this is a different chip compared to the one used in other Thunderbolt-equipped Macs we’ve seen so far. This chip, codenamed Eagle Ridge, is capable of handling two bi-directional 10Gbps Thunderbolt channels and one DisplayPort output. This means you can connect only one display, that is, no daisy-chaining of displays here.
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