The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro are out, which means it’s teardown time. PBK Reviews has videos on the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 6 that we can take apart.
Crack open either phone and you’ll find a ton of heat dissipation. The back of the display is covered in copper, so it’s a great heat sink. Beneath the display, the interior is covered in a sticky, heat-dissipating graphite film, making the phone look noticeably cluttered than the iPhone 13’s carefully curated interior. Lake heat dissipation: an aluminum center plate that connects to the large chips with thermal tape.
The back of the screen is also interesting. On the left is the fingerprint reader below the display, and you can see why companies are such fans of these components rather than capacitive fingerprint readers on the back. An optical reader is a super thin sticker on the back of the screen – it looks like it’s only a millimeter thick. You can also see the cutout for the brightness under the screen and the proximity sensors, which, like the fingerprint reader, live invisibly below the screen.
PBK Reviews
PBK Reviews noticed a few interesting differences between the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. On the Pro model, the haptic motor is on the bottom of the phone, while the Baseline Pixel 6 has it toward the top. The bottom is a better location as that’s usually where your hand is, giving you a stronger feel of the haptic motor. Depending on the region and carriers, some Pixel 6 models have mmWave and others do not. If you get a model without mmWave, in the mmWave spot you will find…a placeholder made of metal.
This teardown confirms what we suspected of the Pixel 6’s 5G mmWave functionality – it doesn’t seem very well thought out. For starters, mmWave isn’t a great phone feature. It’s getting undue attention as carriers use mmWave to justify 5G speed claims in their commercials. However, the truth is that hardly anyone has reliable access to mmWave. A recent study by OpenSignal found that users with compatible devices spend only 0.8 percent of their time on mmWave.
Even if you could find a mmWave network with the Pixel, the Pixel 6 only has one mmWave antenna, which sits along the top edge of the phone (in a highly visible plastic window). Most of the justification for including mmWave in a phone revolves around its reputation for enabling fast download speeds. Most of this speed would be for media consumption, in which case the phone would be in landscape. But with the antenna on the top, the mmWave signal is blocked by your hand in landscape mode. Compare this Pixel design decision to the one in the Galaxy S21, which has two mmWave antennas, each on a long edge of the phone, and there’s a higher chance that the Galaxy S21’s mmWave signal will work better in either landscape orientation. Qualcomm’s original mmWave documents recommended four antennas, one on each side of the phone, because it’s so easy to block a mmWave signal with your hand. Most people will probably never find a mmWave signal, but even if you could on the Pixel 6, the antenna location makes it seem like it’s just spec sheet padding.
Sadly, iFixit seems to have left the Pixel line, with the last site being a full teardown being the Pixel 4. One thing I really miss is iFixit’s research on the chips on the motherboard, which aren’t covered in either video. It would be nice to see the Google Tensor SoC, that discrete Samsung Exynos 5G modem and all the other components Google uses, but this video is purely about replacing parts.
In terms of repairability, the USB-C port is soldered to the motherboard, making an often damaged part more difficult to repair. As usual, everything is glued together, meaning any repair could compromise the water resistance of the device. PBK Reviews also tried swapping out some parts to see if there were any iPhone-style software locks preventing repairs. While the screen replacement went well, they encountered an error message when replacing the fingerprint sensor. A later update to the video description notes that they later got the sensor to work by visiting Google’s official repair site, running some calibration software, and then factory resetting the device.