A mixed success on the reparability scale
Google has some new phones officially on sale that it would love you to buy — assuming you can find them in stock, of course. If you’re still waiting for your Pixel 6 or 6 Pro to arrive on your doorstep, kill some time by watching a teardown of both devices, showcasing just how repairable each model really is.
These teardown videos come to us from PBKReviews on YouTube, who took a toolkit to each of Google’s latest smartphones to find out what lies inside. As usual, each phone has also received a repairability score out of 10, rating each device on how easy removing and replacing parts is. While neither Pixel is the least repairable phone we’ve seen this year, they also fail to hit the peaks of the Galaxy S21.
Let’s start with the smaller phone. To open it up, you’ll need to remove the SIM card tray, heat the front glass panel, and slowly lift it before disconnecting a ribbon cable. We get a glimpse of the under-display fingerprint reader — something that our reviews have found to be much slower than similar competing smartphones. It’s attached directly to the screen, so removing it is a lot more complicated than it otherwise would be.
Once you’re into the actual phone, you can remove the graphene paper to access nine Torx screws, which hold the key to getting into the rest of the Pixel 6. From here, everything else seems pretty straightforward, as PBKReviews’s video shows off the haptics motor, battery, and that beefy camera module.
Unfortunately, it seems as if the charging port is soldered directly onto the mainboard, which makes it much more difficult to replace than it otherwise would be. Overall, the phone scores a 6 out of 10 for repairability due to the adhesive holding the screen down and the number of steps involved in opening up the device.
As for the Pixel 6 Pro video, it’s relatively similar. We get a look at some of the slight differences between the two phones — most notably that telephoto lens built into the camera module. The adhesive keeping the battery in is much stronger, unfortunately, which ends up lowering the Pro’s score down to a 5.5 out of 10.
Finally, PBKReviews swaps components between two Pixel 6 Pro devices to determine whether things like the display and fingerprint reader still functions as intended or if they’ve been locked down. It quickly becomes apparent that the fingerprint sensor is, in fact, locked to the mainboard, which means it needs to move between devices as you’re repairing, possibly requiring a Google-certified repair shop to work on the phone for you. Thankfully, the camera and battery work fine following the swap.
These scores place the phones even with Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra, falling short of the 8.5 the regular S21 earned this year, but far better than the 2 out of 10 given to the Galaxy Z Fold3. Considering how hard it is to get a hold of these phones — especially if you’re after the larger size — it’s a bummer to see them not quite reach the heights of repairability just yet.
Read Next
About The Author
