For those interested in seeing the internal components of Samsung’s Galaxy S7 without actually opening up their own device, there are already a few teardown videos available. But iFixit specializes in disassembling devices while providing a very detailed description of the process as well as the functionality of each of the pieces found inside them, and now, they have given such treatment to the Galaxy S7. iFixit points out that the Galaxy S6 was quite hard to repair because of its glass-on-glue construction, and since the Galaxy S7 looks quite similar to its predecessor, it would be interesting to see if Samsung improved its construction.
They start by applying some heat to the device so that the glued back plate of the device comes off. They then unscrew the antennas at the top, a smooth surface that contains the wireless charging coil in the middle, and the speaker at the bottom. All of these components are connected to the motherboard with spring contacts. The battery is also glued, so removing it is not very easy. They remove the front-facing camera in order to take away the motherboard, which contains components such as the processor, RAM, flash storage, Wi-Fi module and NFC controller. The 3.5 mm headphone jack at the bottom was fairly easy to remove.
The cables for the capacitive buttons are underneath the AMOLED display, making the daughterboard (which connects to the motherboard), the charging port, microphone and soft button LEDs extremely hard to repair, as the whole display needs to be removed to access them. Obviously, the display and digitizer would be just as hard to repair. Some more glued antennas get removed and the liquid cooling system is then visible. It is actually a very small heat pipe with measures less than half a millimeter thick and uses less than a gram of material. The cooling system helps dissipate heat into other parts of the phone, probably towards the metallic frame. iFixit gave the Galaxy S7 a repairability score of 3 out of 10, which is even lower than the one given to the Galaxy S6. The reason is that even though there were some modular components which were very easy to replace, the glued-on components were harder to remove, plus, the display needs to be removed in order to replace many of the components.
