Google Home teardown reveals an easy to repair speaker and a mystery cable

With the $129 Google Home connected speaker now available for purchase in the US from several retailers, you may be wondering what’s inside Google’s effort to compete with Amazon’s Echo lineup. Thankfully, iFixit has put its trademark teardown efforts on the Google Home, and it claims it’s actually easy to repair.

Overall, iFixit gave the speaker an 8 out of 10 on its own repairability scale, stating that it uses standard screws and connectors and that many of its parts are modular so they can be replaced quickly. The only low mark was given to the large amount of adhesive tape that was used to stick the touch board to the upper case of the Google Home.

The teardown also revealed some of the companies that supplied parts for the speaker. Samsung made the 512MB of DRAM in the Google Home, while Toshiba made the 256MB of Flash storage inside. Texas Instruments provided the audio amplifier and Peerless was the source for the speaker driver.

One minor but interesting bit about the teardown was that there was what iFixit called a “mystery cable” with four contact points inside the part of the speaker that hold the magnets for its bottom case. The team came up with its own funny theories about this discovery, but what do you think this cable was made for? Let us know in the comments.