A Friday Distraction: Abundant Teardown Satisfaction

I thought I’d counterbalance yesterday’s admittedly ‘heavy’ and pessimistic piece with a lighter, more upbeat writeup…one that, data suggests, is particularly appropriate for today. You see, as is probably not a surprise to many of you, my peers and I have access to EDN site statistics both overall and writeup-specific. And over many years’ worth of trend graphs, we’ve noticed that site accesses are consistently ‘up’ on Thursdays and Fridays. I honestly doubt it has anything to do with the writeups that we publish on those particular days; on average, over time, we’ve probably run equivalent numbers of ‘great’ and ‘merely good’ pieces every work day. Rather, I suspect that as the end of the work week nears, you’re all more likely to have wrapped up your work (or not ) and therefore be motivated to redirect your attention to EDN.com for educational and/or entertainment purposes.

As such, I offer the following chronologically ordered list of product teardown reports that I’ve been collecting over the past 2+ years (!!!). Given how popular EDN’s Prying Eyes pieces are, I suspect you’ll enjoy these writeups, too.

• Nintendo Wii (and chip die shots)
• Sony PlayStation 3
• 1^st-generation Microsoft Zune (30 GByte)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 (and another, and mine)
• Apple 2^nd-generation iPod shuffle
• Nintendo DS
• 1^st-Generation Sony Reader
• Nintendo Wii remote control (and another, complete with microphone speculation)
• Nokia N800 Internet Tablet
• Apple TV (and another…and another…and another)
• Apple iPod classic (and an audio quality critique, along with a bill-of-materials cost estimate)
• Apple 3^rd-generation iPod nano (and a bill-of-materials cost estimate)
• Apple iPod touch
• Sony PlayStation Portable Slim
• ASUS Eee PC (700 series) (and another)
• 2^nd-generation 8 GByte Microsoft Zune (and another)
• 2^nd-generation 80 GByte Microsoft Zune
• Amazon Kindle
• 2^nd-generation Sony Reader
• Western Digital MyBook World Edition
• Pleo (and another)
• Add Bluetooth to your iPod
• OLPC XO-1 (and another)
• Pure Digital Flip Video
• Apple MacBook Air (and another…and another…and USB port augmentation)
• An inexpensive pedometer
• Apple 2^nd-Generation MacBook Pro
• Everex Cloudbook Part 1 and Part 2
• Apple Time Capsule
• Eye-Fi SD Card
• Chumby
• Dell Latitude XT Tablet
• ASUS Eee PC (900 Series)
• MSI Wind U100 (and another)
• ASUS Eee Box
• ASUS Eee PC (901 Series) (and analysis…and another)
• TRS-80 Model 100
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
• Via OpenBook
• Asus Eee PC (1000 Series)
• Samsung Instinct
• Various Sawn-In-Half Cameras
• Panasonic DMP-BD30K Blu-ray player
• Acer Aspire One

…and of course…

• The 2^nd-generation 3G Apple iPhone (believe it or not, iFixit flew all the way to New Zealand in order to get the teardown completed and published as soon as possible!)

Happy weekend, all! Now get back to work!