iFixit teardown shows what's inside the Pixel 4 XL

Take a peek inside the Pixel.

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Eli Blumenthal is a senior editor at CNET with a particular focus on covering the latest in the ever-changing worlds of telecom, streaming and sports. He previously worked as a technology reporter at USA Today.

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Eli Blumenthal

Oct. 24, 2019 9:28 a.m. PT

Google Pixel 4 XL iFixit teardown — The disassembled Pixel 4 XL.
iFixit

Google's Pixel 4 and 4 XL are now shipping and while we've known about the device for months, on Thursday the folks at iFixit took Google's latest XL phone apart to see just what goes into the handset.

While much of it is relatively unsurprising, the teardown reveals just what Google is doing with Soli -- its radar tech that allows the Pixel to be controlled through hand gestures (or what Google calls "Motion Sense"). More impressive is just how small the chip is, which seemed to baffle the experts at iFixit.

Soli chip Pixel 4 XL — Google's Soli radar chip is fairly small for the technology it possesses.
iFixit

"Although radar technology has been in use for a long time and seems simple enough on paper," the site says, "we're at a loss as to how Google stuffed the entire system into a tiny featureless rectangle with no moving parts."

In addition to the Soli chip, iFixit also found a Knowles audio processor chip that it speculates may help with the impressive speech recognition and that the phone's new neural core is "layered under some dedicated Samsung RAM, meaning it must be doing some heavy lifting."

As for repairability, well, the phone was given the same 4/10 score as last year's Pixel 3 XL . iFixit complains that all repairs require complete disassembly of the phone, a process made harder by its "stubbornly glued back panel."

Read CNET's full Pixel 4 review and Pixel 4 XL review here.