All part of Apple’s secret plot to make another $59 when the remote battery dies in roughly 20 years.
Seriously, the current remote needs to be charged max twice a year. That battery will never need to be replaced.
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Apple TV 4K Very Easy to Repair but Siri Remote Battery Difficult to Replace, Teardown Shows
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All part of Apple’s secret plot to make another $59 when the remote battery dies in roughly 20 years.
Seriously, the current remote needs to be charged max twice a year. That battery will never need to be replaced.
I can't help it if you don't understand when / why a rechargeable battery needs to be replaced.
You're right, they did it on purpose. Such deliberate acts are sometimes referred to as engineering and/or design in the industry.
I don't think companies should be forced to break their design because of a battery. Just buy something else, Roku, Google etc.
When would you even replace the battery? After 8+ years of use?
Forced to break the design? It was designed from scratch, and thicker than the old one. Are you under the assumption that batteries cannot fail?
This same mindset of 'zero ****s given about battery replacement' also makes AirPods a disposable item as well.
The company that brags about saving the environment releases a disposable ATV remote and disposable ear buds and you're defending them for it?
So there's still a fan in it.. I'm really hesitant bringing gadgets with air fans into my bedroom even if everyone say theres no audible sound at all. Sensitive soul. Will probably not be another Apple TV without a fan though. The dilemma. I already have the Apple TV 4K in the living room.
I'm thinking the fan and the rear ports would likely be the only thing that would ever need replacing.
Won't criticize the remote because unlike the previous model at least this one CAN be opened to replace the battery. I'll take "difficult to repair" over "impossible to repair" any day of the week.
Can you hear the current Apple TV 4K?
Try bring that to your bedroom and seeing how quiet or noisy it is. I can’t see why the newer Apple TV 4K would be louder or quieter.
I've watched a few of their "tear downs" and if they are all like that, I will call them hacks....no ground strap, no anti-static mat on the work surface, etc.
iFixit is doing these teardowns as an education/explorative teardown. They aren’t concerned about the reliability or functionality of the device afterwards.
Otherwise, you would definitely want an ESD safe environment with the proper grounding.
(my workbench is grounded, has an ESD mat, and I wear a wrist strap and ESD smock)
The battery is glued in, but, it's easy to remove.
iFixit has released its teardown of the second-generation Apple TV 4K, revealing an easy to repair, modular design, alongside a laborious process to dismantle the redesigned Siri Remote.
As with previous Apple TV models, the entire plastic shell of the device is transparent to IR light, allowing the Siri Remote to be used from any angle.
The large fan inside the Apple TV is not connected with a cable to the logic board, using four metal contact pins instead, making disassembly even easier. iFixit noted the easy teardown of the Apple TV since each of its components are simply layered in place and easy to remove with a screwdriver.
In the redesigned Siri Remote, the battery is located in the bottom half, with circuitry taking up the top half. To get inside, two screws have to be removed from a panel on the bottom of the remote where the Lighting port is located, but iFixit found that it is not possible to access anything meaningful here without removing even more screws elsewhere.
The Clickpad and buttons had to be removed with brute force, revealing more screws to remove. Once these were taken out, the battery and circuitry could be slid out of the bottom of the remote. iFixit noted that the entire disassembly of the new Siri Remote was made difficult by "super tight" tolerances.
iFixit discovered that the Siri Remote uses a "tiny" 1.52 Wh battery and it is not glued in place, which should make replacement somewhat easier.
Like the previous model, the second-generation Apple TV scored an eight out of 10 for repairability. The new remote, on the other hand, was very difficult to repair. Even a simple battery replacement requires total disassembly and risks damage.
Article Link: Apple TV 4K Very Easy to Repair but Siri Remote Battery Difficult to Replace, Teardown Shows
See at: 2:50
You know what, there's almost always an easy fix, the problem with remotes is that people drop them a lot which leads to one component getting loose, it's 99% of the time the oscillator that breaks with its very thin flimsy leads.
It's a 5 minute (soldering) fix.
Other it's the IR Leds, also, an easy (soldering) fix.
Both of the above are 99.99% of the cases, the rest of the components just don't break.
Exactly this, it will be 2 decades before battery is dead.
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A bigger fan needs less RPM to cool stuff thus quieter.
That is what I always did when I had replace components on boards in the broadcast TV equipment where I used to work. Mistakes were expensive as some of the boards were many thousands of dollars.
There seems to be a lot of room in the remote below the buttons in the center (2:45).
Wonder if somebody is keen to mod it with an AirTag
Wonder if somebody is keen to mod it with an AirTag
I toiled away in an AT&T central office for almost 35 years and we were subject to disciplinary action if we got caught handling a circuit pack without ESD protection. Regular refresher courses on ESD were common. They showed us movies of ESD damage to components that were caused by discharges that couldn’t even be felt by the person handling the circuit pack. The company claimed to lose millions of dollars a year because of failed components due to ESD and I believe them.
So I cringe whenever I see these incredibly sensitive components being handled with any ESD protection at all. They may not fail instantly but the damage could take months or years to finally kill the board.
i completely forgot it has a rechargeable battery…which last for so long. so ofc it isn’t replaceable.
This is a teardown for the sake of educating and generating a repairability rating. It doesn't matter if it never works again. I'm sure they're assuming they'll break something in the teardown process anyway, esp. with those that score low repairability.
This entire article and concept of rating the reparability of this device is silly. But not to be outdone, commenters make it even more silly by complaining that a battery that should outlast the life of the device by many many moons is not easily replaceable. Mind you, it is still somewhat replaceable, just not to the degree to make it super easy 20+ years from now when the time comes. Good grief...
As opposed to an accident? Tim Apple raging because some idiot forgot to put the replaceable battery panel on the remote?
of course it’s deliberate.
Nobody's pulling grandpa's 20 yr old Apple TV out of storage to watch Star Wars in in 1080p.
I would be genuinely surprised if anyone in the forums kept their devices longer than 4 yrs. Apple stops supporting them in 5, after which I'd assume most service providers will stop streaming to legacy devices. Root certificates expire every 20 yrs, after which the product is a doorstop. In the meantime, all the remotes will be tossed in a year or two after a remote with a U1 chip hits the market.