Amazon Kindle Fire Teardown

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon-Kindle-Fire-Teardown/7099/1

by zeratul • 15 years ago

47 21 15 years ago

baddox• 15 years ago

For some reason, the cleanness and crispness of their photographs always prompts me to look through all their galleries, even though I'm not very interested in the guts of a Kindle Fire.

kitcar• 15 years ago

It's all in the lighting - specifically, having a "light tent". There are lots of DIY light tent instructions available via Google if you want to try to reproduce the effect -

icco• 15 years ago

Just FYI, while I agree that it is all in the lighting, as of March of 2011, iFixit did not use a light tent. I don't work there anymore, but when I did, most of iFixit's lighting equipment could be bought from Home Depot. I thought there was a blog article on the setup, but I can't seem to find it.

antonyme2• 15 years ago

I hope people take any BOM costs that might come up with a huge grain of salt. The hardware component costs are only one part of the costs of getting a complex product such as this to market.

The way people repeat these iFixit teardown costs as net costs and imply that there is a huge margin is utterly misleading (as has happened with various iProducts in the past).

These tear downs are useful and nicely done though - a great resource.

ugh• 15 years ago

You are thinking of iSuppli: They do the BOM cost estimates. iFixIt only does tear downs. Easy to confuse, I know.

johnbatch• 15 years ago

isuppli did a "preliminary virtual teardown" listing a BOM of $209 http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/Amazon-Sells-Kin...

antonyme2• 15 years ago

Ah, yes - thank you, that's who I was thinking of.

iFixit are a fine mob indeed!

gamble• 15 years ago

That's exactly what gross margin is for. The number itself is arbitrary; people are only interested in it so that they can compare against other products from the same company.

joezydeco5• 15 years ago

Wow, is there anyone using Freescale's iMX SoC anymore? TI is cleaning up in the non-iOS market.

tesseract3• 15 years ago

I don't think the iMX was ever targeted at smartphones or smartphone-ish tablets. And as far as I am aware it's still in things like digital photo frames, appliances, automotive infotainment, and other applications where it's nice to have Linux driving a big color TFT, but there's not a big demand for processing power.

joezydeco5• 15 years ago

The first Kindle, Sony Reader, and Microsoft Zune (AKA Toshiba Gigabeat) were i.MX designs. The i.MX5 series has the same ARM Cortex-A8 core as the OMAP3 and Apple A4. Processing power isn't the factor here, but OMAP definitely is easier to fit into a design with the stacked RAM.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

TI is silently creeping up on quite a number of sub-markets. Thankfully it mostly seems to be because they are simply making rather high-quality offerings.

olihb• 15 years ago

This is crazy, the CPU is under the RAM chip (step 9). Is this kind of layout frequent? I guess you can't have a high power (and high heat dissipation)...

semenko• 15 years ago

Yep -- this is referred to as Package on Package (PoP).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_on_package

joezydeco5• 15 years ago

You can still sink a lot of heat under the chip through the PCB, and you can still put a thermal sink on top. But yeah, these packages need to run pretty cool. This particular CPU runs at 1.8V now.

ww520• 15 years ago

Anyone rooted the Fire yet? Ssh into it?

Amazon Kindle Fire Teardown

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