iFixit Tears Down Google Home, Gives it an 8 Out of 10

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Those who pre-ordered Google Home from the Play Store finally started to receive their unit this week. The product has even made its way onto store shelves at Best Buy, Target and Walmart as well, although some stores were having trouble keeping the device in stock this weekend. This morning, we are seeing a complete teardown of Google Home from iFixit, and we are very happy to see it get a repairability score of 8 out of 10.

Google didn’t choose to make the product as compact as smartphones are, so we weren’t really surprised to see it get a score like this. It’s just good to see that Google didn’t go out of their way to make it harder to repair than it should be. To start the teardown, you simply need to remove the magnetic speaker grill attachment from the bottom. From here, you will find 4 torx screws that attach the bottom speaker base to the top lid of the device.

Be careful when removing this top lid though, as the motherboard is connected to another board that sits at the very top of the lid. This board is attached to the top of the lid with some very strong adhesive, so be sure you are prepared to unstick that glue if you need access to it. This adhesive is required so the capacitive board will always touch the top of the lid (which is needed so you can control it with touch gestures).

This capacitive board also holds an Atmel ATSAMD21 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, 2 NXP PCA9956BTW LED drivers, and 2 621 PS006L microphones. On the motherboard itself we see a Marvell 88DE3006 Armada 1500 Mini Plus dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 media processor, Toshiba TC58NVG1S3HBA16 256 MB NAND flash, Marvell Avastar 88W8897 WLAN/BT/NFC SoC, Texas Instruments TAS5720 audio amplifier, and a Samsung K4B4G16 512 MB B-Die DDR3 SDRAM chip.