Amazon has launched Fire TV, a new set-top box that will stream movies and TV as well as allow you to play video games. This small black box costs $99 and is available with Amazon at the time of launch. With the launch of Fire TV, Amazon has directly come into competition with the likes of Apple TV and Roku. This new device comes with several apps, such as Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu Plus and Netflix. It also comes with a remote with voice control.
Like always, iFixit has got their hands on the latest shining gadget, the Fire TV. The folks at iFixit broke it down and found some interesting details on what lies under the hood.
Before we start on the teardown details, let’s take a look at its specs. The Fire TV comes with some powerful specs, such as a quad-core, 1.7 GHz Qualcomm Krait 300 processor, Qualcomm Adreno 320 dedicated GPU, 2GB RAM, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth and more. This is certainly the most powerful TV box ever, and a dedicated Adreno 320 GPU means you can even play some games with a gamepad controller.
Taking apart the Amazon Fire TV
According to the teardown experts, Amazon Fire TV is not for those who would like to tinker with it. It is a “hard to disassemble” box and taking it apart is quite a hard job and not for just anyone out there. Just a single board holds all the vital components, and the company called it a “black box full of fairly ordinary components.”
Beneath the board, we can find the device’s heat sink, which does the job of keeping internal components cool. The heat sink encompasses most of the bottom case and is one essential component of the device.
The remote, as advertised by Amazon, is voice controllable and comes with replaceable batteries, which is a plus point. The remote also houses an MD v1.2 microphone, the same one that’s bundled with the Kindle Fire HD. The gaming controller is also tamper-proof and requires a tri-wing screwdriver to pop it open.
Now, over to the most important part: the repairability score. Amazon Fire TV gets a score of 6 out of 10 on iFixit’s Repair-ometer. The device for sure is hard to crack open and “quite repair-unfriendly given that a single board holds all the vital components.”
