Let's crack open an iPhone 12 that was submerged in a lake and see what's inside (live stage demo)
Let's crack open an iPhone 12 that was submerged in a lake and see what's inside (live stage demo)
28:58

Let's crack open an iPhone 12 that was submerged in a lake and see what's inside (live stage demo)

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[MUSIC] Hey, welcome back to CES 2021 with CNET we're here Year this year to crack open some more gadgets just like we do every year at CES and of course with us we've got tech Republic's bill detweiler. So Bill, tell everybody what you're cracking open this year. Yeah, so we've got some really exciting things to take apart just like we always do. Years past we've done things like the BB eight, droid, we've done the Apple Pencil, which was great and we almost set the stage on fire. But this year, we've got an iPhone 12 that we're going to take apart, And not just any iPhone 12 but the one that CNET, torture tested out in Lake Tahoe to do the water test so we're gonna see if there's any damage inside that we can see. It won't turn on so we think there is but that should be exciting. And fun. And then we also have an Xbox series s that we're going to take apart, one of this year's new game consoles. So, I can't wait to get into it. Alright, so, Bill, every year at CES like you said, you do this But you also do this. During the time [LAUGH] you're not at CES. Of course you do it during the year you crack open these gadgets. You've been doing this for a long time when we were colleagues and worked at CES, worked at Tech Republic together Over 10 years ago, the first Xbox was actually one of the first things that was cracked open Xbox 360, I believe it was. And an Apple iPod was one of the early things that you cracked open as well. So this one goes back a long time. These two products are our ancestors of two of the first things that you cracked open You know, over a decade ago, they are. You know, I remember when we took apart the first iPhone, I think we use the kitchen knife or razor blade, a few large screwdrivers, so it was quite an experience. We've moved on a little bit. You know, that's something that we always do really talk about the cracking opens. They're now a little more specialized tools. The screws that are special, you just saw me remove these Little bitty screws here these are pentalobe screws and you know they are you can buy tools on the internet now to take them apart. Also the devices are just made to be taken apart now much more easily and repaired than they were in the past which is great for either DIY or if you want to take it back to the manufacturer. So with the iPhone 12 One of the first things we always do in, I'm gonna do that right now, is, I'm gonna remove the, I'm gonna try to hold it up to the side camera here. I'm gonna remove the SIM card holder. And then I've already. Removed the two pentalobe screws here from the bottom bottom next to the lightning port and those are the same on the 12 as they were on the 11 or on the 10 and then I'm going to try I'm going to use a suction cup Try to pull off the front screen now. The screens on the iPhone 12 are a little different in that they do open sideways but they open to the opposite side as they did on the 11. So I've also I haven't cracked open at 12 before so this is going to be a little bit of an adventure. We may see some breakage. I don't know. I hope not. But again, this phone is already a little bit wonky because of the torture test that we did in Lake Tahoe. That cnet's Lexi cvds did where they submerged it underwater. So we're gonna see if this comes off. One of the things this has an IP 68 rating and With that rating, it means it's it's rated down to six feet 20 meters for about 30 minutes. To do that it looks like I'm going to have to change up my thinking here a little bit. They had to include a little more adhesive I think within the iPhone and so That has made these harder to take apart than perhaps previous versions that were a lot easier to take apart. So I'm going to see if I can pop up the edge here And if this won't pop up now. If this won't pop up bill does that mean you might have to bring out the heat gun? Well, so yeah, that's exactly it. They have actually changed their recommendations for the apple service guidelines for this phone and they are recommended for the first time that they use heat to heat the adhesive The heat the adhesive that holds the that holds the front glass display assembly to the base and so I really would like to not crack it but it is awfully hard to pull it up I can I can see that now. So And I also want to make sure we have plenty of time to get to the Xbox series x. Get this off, so I might have to bring out the heat gun, which is Steven by over here. And that's something is also interesting too, for this teardown, you know, we're kind of doing this a little bit on the fly. Jason it's all COVID right now. So we are I'm actually in a Google where techrepublic is located, and I'm filming this on an iPhone 11 for the main camera and an iPhone or an iPad Pro. For the little close up camera here, and you're beaming from a different location. And we're sending this signal over I think to Lake Tahoe, into New Jersey, and then out to everyone else. So let's see what we can do. This is also with the iPhone 12 it's a little different. Obviously they changed the design of the iPhone 12, where it's got the different sides here are more like reminiscent of previous iPhone models. The old four and the five iPhones. Yeah, so we're going to give this one more shot and then I might have to break out the heat gun. Was really hoping so. [CROSSTALK] Those little picks you're using there are very thin they It looks like a guitar pick. But in reality, it's much thinner than that and you're sliding that along the edge there to see if you can loosen the glass. Loosen the adhesive there.And you know you do these things pretty regularly and as I say every year You have a great track record of not breaking these things, of getting these things open, I usually go off. Because Tech Republic of course is focused on the business users and IT professionals. So, you're breaking these apart. We call it cracking open, but you rarely crack anything. You've rarely literally crack it, because you're trying to get it apart for IT professionals and for technicians and engineers, so that they can learn how to take these things apart from themselves or to repair them, if they're items that they need to use the complete gun or to also learn about these things. We learn a lot about these devices. When you crack them open, it's also a way to learn about the chips that are inside to learn more about the products themselves, and the more that you know about them obviously, the better you can support them if you're an IT support professional, that kind of thing, which is of course what tech Republic's audience includes a lot of professionals, IT administrators, IT support professional CIOs And all those folks [CROSSTALK] Yeah, well, we're gonna use a heat gun to try and satisfy that curiosity by loosening the adhesive that's inside here without setting anything on fire. You can use hair dryers. You can use heat pads you can use I've even seen microwave microwave pads that you can heat up and then lay on top. Hofferth for a time. But we're going to use a heat gun which allows us to control the heat a little bit better. Now we're going to see what we can do. Still don't know if this is going to come off. I have heard that these are very difficult to get apart. I may just have to bite the bullet. There we go. Getting some progress there.>> Yeah, we got a little bit of traction here. The heat helps [BLANK_AUDIO] Little bit of traction, what you usually don't want to do with glass. So this is a little metal tool. And what I will try there we go. What I'll try to do is not use the point to actually go inside the glass. Now again When we started doing this years ago, Jason, especially with the iPhone, the reason we did a lot of it too, was to, see what's inside satisfy our own curiosity and like you said, learn how to support the devices. All that and We It was also expensive to repair these items, maybe almost as expensive or very hot, almost as expensive as just a replacement. And so what we have, what's happened now is that the devices themselves have actually gotten. Cheaper to repair. So you can see how difficult the time I'm kind of having and it is kind of, there we go. And so would I necessarily so recommend that people do this for their own devices. For this type of repair, no, I just don't recommend it. If you have AppleCare, if the device is still under warranty, whether it's a Samsung device, or an Apple device, take it to an authorized repair centre. It's $120, $130, $150, whatever the price is usually to fix a broken screen, deal with some water damage, and you're probably gonna have a little better outcome. Then if you try to do it yourself. Now I say that because the device themselves are the repair cost has gone down and so that's that's really the change. All right, so we managed to get this apart he did the trick. I wanna try to Show this over here so people can kind of see me opening up. You have to be very careful because there are really thin cables and that's the other thing that once we get in here and we get a chance to look at some of the, the chips and the connectors, if you break one of the cables, if you damage one of the connectors It can like an increase the cost of repair, it can make the phone a simple repair but placing the screen much more difficult, all right. I will now see if I can peel this over here to the camera and okay, now here is [CROSSTALK] Look at that. So, okay- You've got it. So if I leave this open here and you look inside, we can actually see So we were talking about Lexie taking this and working with the drone company taking it out to Lake Tahoe right now Lake Tahoe, fresh water. So you don't have a problem with salt water that you often do with electronics at least you can let fresh water that gets into electronics. Dry thoroughly, then, sometimes you can bring them back to life as long as there isn't any kind of electrical damage you didn't get a short circuit to burn something out.Here, you can actually see inside and I'm gonna try and hold this up to the my iPad camera Yeah Wonderful If I can, if I can, I don't know if it'll focus here and you can see there's moisture inside this stall. Now the CNET team Lexie, let this sit for 72 hours. So they They sent it down on a drone, like I said, two 20 meters and then the 60, or to, the six feet. And then down to 65 feet. So six meters and 20 meters. And if I got my math wrong, I apologize, but they may, and it worked, it worked when it came back up. But then once they let it sit for 72 hours they couldn't get out of anything other than diagnostic mode. And you can see in here even after 72 hours the seals on here, this is moisture. This is water. I didn't put the water in here. This isn't from heating it up. But there's all kinds of water in here. That it just makes the phone inoperable right now and so the only way to actually bring this phone back to life would be. Take it to an apple store and see if they can do something with it. Remember, water damage typically is not covered by Apple care about by the warranty on the iPhone depending on what level of sort of Apple care you may have. But yeah, water damage is not something that is really covered. So don't go scuba diving with your phone. Wow. So hey look the victory here is that you got it open without cracking that screen and without having to do any external or immediate damage to it. So, good work you got another one open bill. We're going try and remove some of the little connectors here To see if we can't get inside. Again, these are really small, they're really tiny. You definitely don't want to damage any of them when you're taking these things apart because if you do it can pose the phone And this is the one thing that I dislike about Apple. So Apple actually uses tons of, Okay, I know if I can see that can, can, can I get that up there? I don't I don't know anybody can pick this up. It's really tiny. Yeah, not bad. These are easy to lose. These are easy to to misplace. It's easy to forget where it kind of goes exactly. So you do have to be careful when you're doing this. Not too To lose them not to break them not to have anything cuz he can't go down to the hardware store. [LAUGH] And get that ****. And get those screws. You also have to be kinda organized, right? Right Bill? You guys will take them out. You'll put like okay the ones that are go to this part go put them near there. And then because a lot of these screws are different types of screws, they're not all the same kind of ****. So because of that it can get really difficult in putting it back together. It's like a jigsaw puzzle trying to put that thing back together which you often do what after you crack open some of these devices If you put them back together to try to get them back in functional order, in this case this devices is not exactly functional, although it's possible with getting some of that moisture out of there. Maybe it would work again after you're done with it. You never know Indeed, no, okay. No, I don't think so. [LAUGH] And I'll tell you what. So I just remembered this piece and I'm gonna try and hold it up to the camera. Again, I don't know if this is going to come through. So Yep. I move this cover here and you can see a little bit of What looks like scorching or corrosion or burning right there? And if I hold this up to the camera here, and you can kind of get a shot of that. You can see here the moisture has caused If one appears to be a gift something that's either forged or something that is burned or corroded. And so it looks like there could have been an electrical short? I don't know. So we're gonna go ahead so I think this one probably did toast.>> It's toast.>> Yeah. Yeah, This is the one of the things that has made these things these devices easier to repair. [BLANK_AUDIO] So this is the display assembly on the phone here and the there are components attached to it. So let's say you cracked the screen Pop this off get the new screen a hundred some-odd bucks put it on there no worries. But when you have the system board which right here, i'm going to try and hold this up to the camera see if everybody can kind of see it, the system board runs this way and then down like this. It's next to the battery You have the taptic engine down here which does the vibrations and the touch sense or the you know it makes it provides the to touch and you have the lightning connector here. You have speaker assembly down here for the two speakers. You'll have the camera assembly up here and the LIDAR on the Pro will take, I'll take this off so you can kind of see the cameras up here you have the the front facing camera, the IR illuminator for facial recognition, all that stuff, but. This burnt spot appears to be on the circuit board domain circuit board. And that's when it gets really expensive to replace Yeah Because you've got the new a 14 chip on it, the new five nanometer chip, you've got the memory, you've got the storage, you've got basically Everything that I'm, the guts and brains of the phone is on this chip and on the board and when the board's destroyed he and you're pretty up you just have to replace the board. So I'm also going to go ahead and remove this metal plate here which we can get in I'll show you the cameras while we still have a few minutes left on our iPhone.>> Yeah.>> And then we will do the Xbox. Yeah I mean I kinda had hope that this wouldn't be the case with this phone. I was hoping we can try it out, I was hoping we could.>> Me too.>> I was hoping we can get it back in working order But it just looks like we're not gonna be able to do that. But you know [CROSSTALK] you've done well, another day another customer served there, another device will serve. You got it open without damaging it or you find something else. We'll see Well, I can't Moisture you can see under the cameras. You can see the chips there. Yeah, more moisture Yeah. Looks like a little bit of some type of Schmitz is the [LAUGH] Official term for that. Yeah, One thing that I think is kind of interesting. I'm gonna show two phones kinda side by side. Now what I'm holding here, this is the iPhone 12. Pull back a little bit. I actually have an iPhone 11. This is the 11 that we cracked open last year. So yeah, see a little bit of the difference. So I'm holding these the same way. I hope everybody can see this. But you can see how the battery. Has been moved from one side to the other. Yeah. You can see how the circuit board obviously is moved from the other side, one side to the other. You can see the chain in size between the taptic engines. You can see the position of the little SIM card reader is here compared to over here. On the 11th and so it gives you this is you were talking about JC This is one of the things that we like to do with the cracking opens why we do it so that we can see how the technology changes over time. Yeah, that's great. So we're gonna go and I'm gonna try and remove the cameras. Okay, there's cameras. This year the cameras are a lot bigger and the pro course includes that LIDAR sensor. And so, it is an opportunity to learn a little bit about the way they did it. Nice. That's the chip that runs the camera. You can see that it's really got some water damage on it. Yeah. I don't think that's taken any 4k video anytime soon. Mentioned in the LIDAR, so that's something to take notice of the LIDAR on the pro would usually be here And everyone can see it. But the, in the regular iPhone 12 version, there's just a plastic little plastic spacer here. So it uses this. The same we're using basically the same housing, but they just put in a plastic spacer with a LIDAR unit with you. Yeah, it's a good point too. And that LIDAR was a it was a big ad for Apple because LIDAR, as most people probably are aware, is very expensive technology. And so there, they wouldn't Apple wouldn't put that in there. Unless they had some important future plans and so that LIDAR that's one of the things again, we, you know, we crack these things open to learn about them. Although this isn't the Pro max you know, we can note that, like you said, there's a big space for it because that's it That's an in depth technology and an expensive technology. If people are probably may have heard that, Tesla hasn't put Lidar in their vehicles, because even though all of their vehicles are essentially Free or future proofed for self driving technology. And so they focused on on rich on sensors, radar sensors, sound sensors and cameras. Because the LIDAR so expensive were some of the other Automakers are using these giant late LIDAR sensors which are huge and very, very expensive. So it is a really interesting technology and it probably says a little bit about Apple's ambitions to do some future work around augmented reality. And that's pretty interesting and exciting. So I'm just removing the I'm trying to remove here the front facing camera. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to remove it without removing. Okay, yeah, we can think maybe. Well, there's a hidden There are so many hidden connectors that are layered on top of each other that are not you really don't want to damage like if you know at this point, it's not going to hurt this phone anymore it's toast. But you know if you were doing it for your own phone, you definitely wouldn't want to damage them. And it looks like I will have to remove so this and this is kind of the layers are of different components that you have to remove. So I can't really doesn't look like I'm going to be able to get this out. This is the front facing camera, the IR illuminator facial recognition camera and everything without removing this little black spacer to remove this little black spacer. Unfortunately, there is a standoff. So this is a **** that has a You know the receiver of a **** the threads for a **** at the top of it to another **** attaches into it. So I'll need to remove that before I can actually remove the outer can remove this little spacer so we're gonna see if we can do that real quick. It's like a carefully layered gourmet meal. [LAUGH] It is. I will say that Apple's device is like I said, there's the stand all, so it's really hard- Yeah. To see. There's a **** there and then a **** on top, that you could get one of the other screws could fit into and with that- Tiny. Is a stand off somewhere. It is tiny. And you You do have to be careful again because it's not like I can go down to the hardware store and pick up another one of these, you know, these little plastic pieces. Looks like there might be a standoff under and there is another standoff here so I'm trying to get my hands out of the way One of the things that I knew this phone was damaged so I didn't necessarily do it. One of the first things you always wanna do with any type of electronic other than TVs and I don't recommend you mess with TVs is disconnect battery, you always will do that so that you don't have risk of damaging the device through some type of discharge or some type of short that you also don't want to hurt yourself. Alright, so we've removed the little, that little plastic piece and then we can remove What appears to be the camera of assembly here which has a very small, thin components that are connected with adhesive and aid and others grew G's TVs bill because last year at CES you and David katzmaier And I did a video segment that people can find where we did actually crack open a Samsung TV which was a lot of fun and so we don't recommend people take those apart on themselves but like you said, if you wanna see one, let us do it so you don't have to, you can take a look at the crack you open from ces 2020 that you did with cats and I [BLANK_AUDIO] Okay, really All right, so Let's **** up here which is being annoying. Okay, There we go. Okay, so here's, you can see these assemblies are all connected together. [LAUGH] There's all different little blocks. Yeah. You've got the rear it looks like the rear flash is there. Got the front cameras are there. We can see->> It almost looks like [LAUGH] It does. Alright, so I'm gonna see if I can get the circuit board out. Let's see what we got are these and this is, again one of the things Yeah, they're their Phillips screws. Come on Sometimes they're Phillips sometimes they're torques sometimes they're, it's hard to tell. And different manufacturers do different things. So there we go. So I had to change bit. For some reason this **** that holds the that holds the circuit board in is just a hair. Larger. [BLANK_AUDIO] All right, so you just about have this iPhone completely taken apart bill which is great. And so we definitely discovered You got some more moisture we've definitely discovered that there's too much moisture in here for us to have much hope that this that this thing can be dried out and turned into a working unit again. So we've learned just this was one of course as we mentioned at the top that was torture tested by CNET by senior Flexi civilities. Underwater in late Tahoe and it was not bootable, but we thought we would crack it open see what we can learn about it. Definitely found some moisture and some corrosion, some other damage inside there, so it's not a case were we're gonna be able to dry this for now. And get it working again, sadly, but Bill did get. Yeah. It apart, without breaking the screen or any other component. So once again. [CROSSTALK] We will take that as a win. The deaf hands of Bill Detweiler. Yeah, we'll take it. [LAUGH] We'll take it. We'll take that as a little bit of a win here. Yeah, I think I got the. That **** was really rusty. Yeah, and it's pretty bad, pretty rusted there. I don't think there's anything we're gonna be able to do to save this one. All right, well bill detweiler, thank you for cracking open the iPhone 12. And for everybody Stay with us, because we're gonna be back in a minute we're going to crack open something else. We're gonna do the Xbox Series s, not the x but the s and we'll talk about why in a minute.

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