iFixit’s HomePod teardown reveals a veritable tank of a smart speaker that’s incredibly durable but virtually impossible to get inside. Unless you fancy using a heat gun and saw to open up your brand new Apple speaker, that is!
HomePod repairs won’t be easy
On the website’s repairability scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being virtually impossible to repair and 10 being straightforward), the HomePod scores a paltry single point. Perhaps most painful of all is the fact that the iFixit team was only able to gain access to it after using a (cringe!) knife to cut through the beautiful fabric mesh exterior.
Intriguingly, iFixit notes that inside the mesh cover, the device hackers found evidence of a drawstring to remove the outer material, but weren’t able to find out how to use this. “Even though it looks like there ought to be a nondestructive way inside, we failed to decode it,” they admit. “Without a repair manual, your odds of success are slim.”
How HomePod speaker works
Photo: iFixit
The HomePod teardown also, unsurprisingly, focuses on Apple’s cunning sound design for the new speaker. This includes a 4-inch, high-excursion, upward-firing woofer; a beam-forming seven-tweeter array; a beam-forming six-microphone array; and a low-frequency microphone for real-time woofer calibration.
One interesting tidbit about the device’s woofer:
“If the magnet on this woofer looks big for a speaker this size, that’s because it is. Deep, dramatic bass notes depend on a speaker’s ability to move lots of air. While that’s traditionally done by increasing the cone’s diameter, Apple instead increased the travel of the voice coil, which in turn requires a bigger magnet. That way the speaker diameter stays small, but it can still move enough air to deliver quality bass notes.”
You can read more details about the HomePod’s teardown here.
More HomePod news, reviews and how-tos
Get more HomePod news with our guide to Apple’s new smart speaker: Everything you need to know about HomePod.
