Xbox One gets an iFixit teardown

Serial opener of things iFixit is at it again with its screwdrivers and pryers, this time making the brand new Xbox One the victim of their tools. iFixit managed to get their hands on an Xbox One as soon as possible by flying to New Zealand where it launched before anywhere else to do this teardown.

The Xbox One teardown reveal some interesting things. First of all, the Xbox One is an enormous black box due to the rather poor utilization of space on the inside. Whereas Sony decided to make use of every inch on the inside, Microsoft went for a more spaced out design.

The upside to this is that the Xbox One probably won’t be having any overheating issues like the Xbox 360. Not only are the insides spacious and airy, Microsoft has installed a massive fan that looks like the sort they use in movies to simulate hurricanes. The spacious design also makes it easy to repair and it’s all modular inside with parts that can be disconnected by simply unplugging them from the motherboard.

The Xbox One was found using a standard 2.5-inch, 5,400-rpm Samsung hard drive. Unlike Sony, Microsoft does not offer the option of user replaceable hard drives even though you can technically swap the hard drive yourself if you open the console. Unfortunately, iFixit was unable to confirm whether the console will just accept another hard drive if you plug it in and that is something that remains to be seen.

Few additional discoveries were made. The Xbox One has a speaker inside whose purpose is not yet known. The Wi-Fi module supports 802.11ac, even though Microsoft only lists support up to 802.11n. Perhaps the ac functionality will be unlocked in future through a firmware update, the way Apple did on the MacBooks a few years back.

The boring PC like design has helped the Xbox One get a very high repairability score on iFixit, although the PS4 managed to get the same score despite being much more attractive on the inside. Then again, neither of these things matter a lot to customers as most of them will never bother opening up their consoles.

You can read the teardowns for both the consoles from their respective links below.

Xbox One • PlayStation 4