Google Home, also known as Google’s answer to the Amazon Echo, is finally available for purchase. It’s available in-store at Walmart, Target and Best Buy. You can also buy it from the Google Store, for $129 an aggressive price considering the Amazon Echo is $179. It’s essentially a speaker with the Google Assistant baked in. It’s a pretty great piece of hardware, as our own Reviews Editor, Nick, found in his review of the Google Home last week. However, iFixit has now gotten their hands on the device and decided to tear it apart to see what is inside the device, and they found quite a bit of what they’ve already seen.
What’s interesting about the Google Home, at least internally, is the fact that it’s essentially last year’s Google Chromecast but in a bigger space. It’s ported by the Armada 1500 Mini Plus, with 256MB of storage and 512MB of DDR3 RAM inside. It’s also largely the same spec sheet as what the Amazon Echo has, but the reason that it is $50 cheaper than the Echo is because these parts are now much cheaper than they were two years ago when the Amazon Echo launched. What else was found inside the Google Home was a whole lot of glue holding everything together. This means you’ll need plenty of heat to take the Google Home apart by yourself.
Google Home isn’t perfect, inside, but it has what it needs to do its job. While it’s a bit odd to see glue holding this thing together, it’s not the first time we’ve seen glue inside a piece of tech holding it together, and likely won’t be the last. iFixit gives the Google Home a repairability score of 8 out of 10. One of the better scores we’ve seen for devices this year, that have passed through iFixit’s tear down labs. They have their full tear down available on their website. It’s important to note that this is not a repair guide for the Google Home, for that you’ll want to refer to Google’s own documentation. This is essentially to show you what is inside the Google Home.
Buy the Google Home - WalmartBuy the Google Home - Best Buy