RICHMOND (Virginia) – LUKE Soules was one of the first on the planet to get his hands on an iPad. And he wasted no time taking it apart.
After staking out three locations in the Eastern United States, Mr Soules – co-founder of teardown firm iFixit – cracked the device open on Saturday to unearth Nand flash memory by Samsung Electronics, an LCD display from LG Display and microchips from Broadcom Corp, Texas Instruments Inc and NXP Semiconductor.
Mr Soules and his outfit provide and advise on components in Apple gadgets – and also identifies them. The work of teardown firms such as iFixit may prove crucial in identifying which manufacturer gets its parts into a device expected to sell upwards of 5 million units in 2010 alone. Mr Soules had slept overnight in the parking lot outside an Apple mall store in Richmond, Virginia. He was the first to walk out of the store, moments after the outlet opened at 9am, iPad in hand.
Store employees clapped and gave him high-fives. He grinned, but moved quickly. There was work to do. Without a second’s dawdling, Mr Soules hopped in a waiting car and raced a few short miles to the house of a friend, where he had his tools of destruction ready to go. He barely paused to admire the iPad out of the box. He didn’t even turn it on.
The secretive Apple is famous for designing sealed-up devices intended to discourage nosy gadget heads from poking around in them, and the iPad was no different.
The iPad had no screws. But working with a tool called a spudger, it took Mr Soules only 10 minutes to separate the iPad’s handsome, 9.7-inch facing from its silver-backed casing. He surveyed the iPad’s design, a maze of parts that would be utterly inscrutable to most people. ‘That’s very, very nice,’ he said almost reverentially. — REUTERS
Source: Apples iPad unearthed
