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AirPods Teardown Reveals Charging Case May Have Been Cause of Delay

Narg said:
Sorry, but that struck me as a perfect "Koolaid" style Apple response. I'm hoping you didn't mean it that way. What I read was "I hate when companies do this, but Apple did it so it's OK...." ;)
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Me? Koolaid? Tee hee. What you should have read is "I hate when companies do this, but the copious amounts of glue seem to contribute to the water resistance of the AirPods. Check out this video to see what I'm talking about". That would have been a better reading of my quote since it's exactly what I wrote. Context counts. Parsing does no one any favors. ;)
 
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Seiga said:
Wrong already. It wasn't small scale like you said otherwise Apple wouldn't have made a public announcement to offer free bumper cases to iPhone 4 users. You're masking it completely. And you use "My" and "I" a lot in your statement, you don't speak for the majority. BTW, the "phone had huge success and less returns that the model before it", Show me those numbers! I find that hard to believe when the 3GS was one of the most successful iphones out there.

I agree about the clickbait part. But that's Macrumors, blame them for the article that you all have clicked on and complained that you clicked on. They have an email contact you can address that to.
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No i'm not "wrong already". The 3GS was not the most successful iphone sold - not by a long shot - that belongs to iphone 6 which sold 231 million units (Apple doesn't break sales down by model number but the new phone is the dominant seller for the fiscal year it was released) . iphone 4 came out june 2010, so most of its sales occurred in 2011 - total sales that year 72 million (almost double the sales from the previous year (3gs) which had 40 million) - not bad for a product you clam to be a disaster. It also has had the longest lifespan of any iphone produced - they sold it for about 4 years.
 
31 Flavas said:
Because, yea. A reparability score is totally relevant here.
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It's a fundamental matrix of the ifixit teardowns, without it , you would not have the ifixit website, so even with zero, it's very relevant. Though I see your point that it's all but impossible to attempt to repair these,
 
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31 Flavas said:
It's fake news, that critics want to hear and sites want so they can publish it. Like trump blowing hot wind at his fans. He even at admits such at his rallies. Which surprisingly they cheer for. "Yaye, he just told us locking up Hillary doesn't matter anymore because he won the election!"
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The iFixit report is not "fake news". Please don't expand that phrase to mean everything that is less than 100% certain or carries a point of view different than you'd like. Blurring that line turns an important distinction into a meaningless insult to hurl when you don't want to bother thinking.

iFixit, as their name implies, exists for the purpose of helping people fix their own stuff. Filling a component with goop, no matter how strong the justification for it, prevents home repair. That's all there is to that line of reasoning. The glue makes sense for a design like this, and repairing an Airpod is probably a fools errand anyway, but from iFixit's point of view it works against their mission and what they reported is factual.

The voids in that BGA are troubling, and their conclusion is not unreasonable. You see stuff like that when you run parts though the line too quickly, which is what a manufacturer might do if there was a last minute change and a rush to get units to market before Christmas. Typically the manufacturer will X-ray a least a subset of parts themselves and make a judgement whether it meets their quality standards. Whether these do, or if the manufacturer only reported good X-rays to Apple, or iFixit got an unusually bad unit (not terribly likely), isn't clear. What iFixit reported is factual.

Any PCB process folks around to weigh in on the voiding? Some of those look pretty bad to me, assuming those pads aren't just internal no-connects.
 
Phil A. said:
Or, it might just be a bit of voiding that often occurs with BGA connections and there is a lot of debate about whether it's even an issue to worry about unless excessive

http://www.eptac.com/are-voids-in-solder-joints-really-an-issue/

https://blog.ipc.org/2012/10/25/voiding-criteria-in-bgacsp-component-solder-joints/

http://www.rayprasad.com/bga-voids-and-their-sources-in-smt-assemblies

And, if they do cause an issue it's highly likely to manifest itself during the first 12 months and Apple will just swap any faulty ones out, so it's not something to be overly concerned about :)
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This. Apple is really good with return policies on defective products, they truly care about their customers.
 
It appears that few of you noticed the following statement on iFixit's teardown page:

Our X-ray imagery shows some quality issues in this chip's solder joints. Empty spaces, known as voiding, could be evidence of low quality standards, or a rushed product release. Could issues with the AirPod case be what delayed release?
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What chip is being referred to? Oh, just the main one...

STMicroelectonics STM32L072 ARM Cortex-M0+ MCU

Not a positive sign.
 
ErikGrim said:
We noticed it and debunked early. Voiding in soldering is not indicative of quality issues.
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If true, then why would a highly reputable organization like iFixit know that?

The main reason that "solder joint" comment at iFixit caught my eye is because I've had recurring problems with my late 2009 iMac i7's GPU. Almost exactly the day AFTER my AppleCare expired, my GPU (Radeon HD 4850) expired. Screen would go blank or sometimes I would get the checkerboard pattern, and almost always there was a freeze associated with that. I wrote Tim Cook an email, and a day later I got an Apple exec from Singapore asking if I would accept his call. In the end, I took my machine to the Apple Store in Nagoya Japan and they replaced the GPU (twice) and fixed the problem. But over the last year, the problem has returned even on the new video card (Radeon HD 4850). I've Googled a lot about "re-balling" and "soldering issues." That's why I got the raised eyebrow when I read about "voiding" in the AirPods.

All said, if voiding is a non-issue, why do I have recurring issues with my Radeon HD 4850? If it was the chip dying, I would expect it to stop working entirely, but that hasn't been the case. The fascinating part of the whole problem is that it freezes less and the screen goes black less when I keep it running (which keeps the machine HOT). Since heat "expands" I wonder if the "solder connection issues" I read are true.
 
ErikGrim said:
Highly reputable.... I'mma stop you there.
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Why? Have you, or anyone else here complaining about them, taken time to open a product and then document that opening in great detail with text, photos and video? That's what iFixit does, and the information they provide is quite useful, hence my adjective "highly reputable." You get a reputation based on what you do. They actually do something. They don't just complain in online forums.

Now if your defense of "they don't know what their talking about" is valid, then explain the situation with my 2009 iMac's video card. I cannot help but believe soldering can be and often is a major issue with electronics that have problems.
 
JDW said:
Why? Have you, or anyone else here complaining about them, taken time to open a product and then document that opening in great detail with text, photos and video? That's what iFixit does, and the information they provide is quite useful, hence my adjective "highly reputable."
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Yes, indeed, that is what they used to do. Until they started having public beefs with Apple for making their products "less repairable", finding out that that was how they got more clicks for that and leaning heavily into the clickbait game instead.

So please do read:

http://www.eptac.com/are-voids-in-solder-joints-really-an-issue/
https://blog.ipc.org/2012/10/25/voiding-criteria-in-bgacsp-component-solder-joints/
http://www.rayprasad.com/bga-voids-and-their-sources-in-smt-assemblies

And yes, bad soldering DO cause problems in electronics, but equating "voiding" with the failure in your video card to so far zero failures with AirPods isn't particularly useful in any way.
 
crickey...

How can u fit all of that stuff in ..

I would think after all those components, Apple would have no place to glue anything as a "Ya, i think we have a serious problem"

(The term. "Apple" and "rushed" is not in my vocab..... ) Apple rushed this just because users wanted them before xmas? That doesn't sound like the Apple we know.
 
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ErikGrim said:
So please do read:

http://www.eptac.com/are-voids-in-solder-joints-really-an-issue/
https://blog.ipc.org/2012/10/25/voiding-criteria-in-bgacsp-component-solder-joints/
http://www.rayprasad.com/bga-voids-and-their-sources-in-smt-assemblies
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Thank you for providing those 3 links. I reviewed the information at all three. None of that information says, "voiding is not an issue at all." Indeed, those articles plainly say if the voids are too large, the voids become "detrimental." But one needs to exercise wisdom when reviewing any information source. Consider well that none of those 3 articles you list talk about "strain" or "flexing" or "durability over time" or "impact from vibration stress." None consider heat produced in very hot chips. So to use those articles to say "voiding is a non-issue" is laughable at best.


Again, this is why I mentioned my 2009 iMac. I made a valid point.


Now as to whether iFixit is now centering their business on "hating Apple to gain web visitors" is something that is debatable. But information on product repairability is nothing good nor bad. It's all in how one chooses to view and use that information. I myself have been a Mac user continuously since my 128k in 1984. And yet, I am not afraid to Google "information" on the web, even if it puts Apple in a somewhat negative light. I buy Apple products anyway, even knowing they may not be very repairable.
[doublepost=1482298757][/doublepost]Personally, I would defer to IEEE with regard to discussions on electrical engineering related matters like voiding, and here is a very comprehensive article on the matter:

http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/cpmt/presentations/cpmt1509b.pdf

Take note of the info at the bottom of page 18 which says:

Shear strength of solder bump increased because of low voiding from new solder paste formula.
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Note that "shear strength" has to do with the possibility a solder join will break, crack or separate from the PCB over time. Does voiding have anything to do with shear strength? Yes, it absolutely does.
 
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Not sure why people are upset if glue or not,

whatever it is I want the best user experience and I don't see how glue hinder that.
 
ouimetnick said:
Hearing aids are assembled in a similar fashion and yet they are thousands of dollars. It's the R&D that went into the design and making it so small. I think $160 for these little guys is fail. I'd like to see them at $120 though
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So thousands of dollars for hearing aids is fine. But you're going to quibble about $40 on AirPods?
 
All that glue explains the queues for this otherwise totally unappealing product. There's plenty of it, and Apple glue offers a prime sniffing experience.
 
JDW said:
[doublepost=1482298757][/doublepost]Personally, I would defer to IEEE with regard to discussions on electrical engineering related matters like voiding, and here is a very comprehensive article on the matter:

http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/cpmt/presentations/cpmt1509b.pdf

Take note of the info at the bottom of page 18 which says:



Note that "shear strength" has to do with the possibility a solder join will break, crack or separate from the PCB over time. Does voiding have anything to do with shear strength? Yes, it absolutely does.
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Being completely wrapped up in the case....what forces will these solder points possibly be under that could even begin to factor in shear strength? Thermal from charging the battery is not even worth talking about. The only possible force that could be applied on theses voided joints would be from a drop.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
2-3 years is a L O N G time for portable bluetooth technology. By then, you've likely lost one or both originals and already replaced them with newer ones. But, if not, you buy a new set (much like 2-3 year-old iDevices). Odds are high that if you like these, you're going to buy a new set sooner than 2-3 years anyway because Airpods 2 will likely have Bluetooth 5.
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It really isn't that long for high-quality headphones/earbuds. Also you don't need 50x times the range of Bluetooth 4 for something like headphones.
 
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