Teardown Analysis Shows How Not To Get Burned Repairing Amazon's Fire TV Box
In a perfect world, you'd never need to crack open any of your electronic devices because they'd work forever, dutifully doing their job and never needing repair. Here in the real world, things break, and they have a tendency to happen once that all-important warranty period expires. What then? Well, if you're handy and feeling adventurous, you can try repairing the device yourself. The level of adventure varies by device, and when it comes to Amazon's recently announced Fire TV streaming box, the odds are pretty good you'll be able to get in there without making things worse, provided you practice a bit of patience.
The folks at iFixIt stuck their hands in Amazon's Fire TV for its latest teardown analysis, and in doing so, we get to see the guts of this tightly packed device. In order to get inside, you'll have to pop open a series of stubborn clips that hold on so tight, you may think Amazon used adhesive to secure the chassis even though it didn't.
It was discovered long ago that fire is hot, and apparently so is Amazon's Fire TV, which sports a large heatsink on the bottom of the chassis to prevent the thing from overheating. It takes a bit of force, finesse, and patience to remove the heatsink, which is best achieved by using the same twist method you'd use to remove ice cubes from an ice cube tray.
In the end, iFixIt gave Amazon's Fire TV a 6 out of 10 "Repairability Score" (the higher the score, the easier something is to repair). It earned brownie points for its simple construction, having a separate power supply, and using standard Phillips screws inside the device. On the flipside, the Fire TV was dinged for using "copious amounts of extremely sticky glue" to hold the heatsink in place, making the outer case so tightly clipped together, and using a single board to host all the vital parts (if one component breaks, you have to replace the entire board).
The folks at iFixIt stuck their hands in Amazon's Fire TV for its latest teardown analysis, and in doing so, we get to see the guts of this tightly packed device. In order to get inside, you'll have to pop open a series of stubborn clips that hold on so tight, you may think Amazon used adhesive to secure the chassis even though it didn't.
It was discovered long ago that fire is hot, and apparently so is Amazon's Fire TV, which sports a large heatsink on the bottom of the chassis to prevent the thing from overheating. It takes a bit of force, finesse, and patience to remove the heatsink, which is best achieved by using the same twist method you'd use to remove ice cubes from an ice cube tray.
In the end, iFixIt gave Amazon's Fire TV a 6 out of 10 "Repairability Score" (the higher the score, the easier something is to repair). It earned brownie points for its simple construction, having a separate power supply, and using standard Phillips screws inside the device. On the flipside, the Fire TV was dinged for using "copious amounts of extremely sticky glue" to hold the heatsink in place, making the outer case so tightly clipped together, and using a single board to host all the vital parts (if one component breaks, you have to replace the entire board).
