Apple isn’t exactly known for creating its products repair-friendly, a minimum of not by unauthorized third-party service providers. There are, however, times when it does seem to diverge from that path and throw technicians and enthusiasts a bone.
The Apple TV has been one among its more repairable devices and it doesn’t seem to possess changed this year. Unfortunately, iFixit’s teardown does reveal one wart therein image and it isn’t the Apple TV 4K 2021 in the least.
The Apple TV box itself is really a pleasure to open up and take apart, especially if you’re conversant in how difficult it’s to try to to that with other Apple products. All it takes is a few gentle prying to open up rock bottom plate then the standard Torx screwdriver to slowly remove the massive fan, logic board, heat sink, and power supply.
There were a couple of pleasant surprises inside also as from an IR scan. iFixit discovered that the opaque box is really transparent to infrared, which suggests that you simply don’t need to be precise when pointing the remote.
The Apple TV’s fan was also surprisingly connected only by gold contact points with no cable in view. In contrast, the new Siri wasn’t actually that easy to teardown. The screws at rock bottom barely did anything and iFixit was forced to get rid of all caps and therefore the navigation pad before trying to tug out the board which contains the battery.
Fortunately, that battery was only glued lightly so it didn’t take much force to tug it out. While the Apple TV 4K 2021 itself got an 8 out of 10 from iFixit, the remote, which wasn’t graded, would have probably scored a dismal 2. Given how the remote’s small battery is probably going to die out before the other component, it’s disappointing but unsurprising that Apple made it very difficult to exchange.