Gadgets

Echo Show Teardown: Alexa, Show Us What You Got

What’s the best way to mine massive amounts of data from your customers? Give away a device that does it for you and make it too convenient not to use. When someone gives you something for free, the product they’re really interested in is you—where you like to go, what you care about, and most importantly, what you like to buy. But people know this, which is why Amazon had to slap a price tag on the cheaply made, all-knowing, all-listening, and now all-seeing Echo Show. But it’s not a two-way street, seeing inside this Show is not a walk in the… Kitchen?

Opening the Amazon Echo show for teardown

It’s full of glue, so you better not knock it off the counter. Also, seriously, why does it look like an ancient CRT?

Amazon Echo Show Teardown Highlights:

  • 1.4 amps is not a small amount of current; the Show’s braided ground cable is a flexible solution to get Alexa’s feet back on ground. It also has a large surface area, which can pick up and ground stray EMI.
  • The speaker magnets are so heavy a small child could do bicep curls with them. They also take a lot of power and make a lot of shake—good thing everything is insulated against vibration and grounded in here.
  • Crazy strong glue left us with an LCD panel that looks like it was removed by an angry tiger.  And though it shares specs with the Fire Tablet, it’s a model we haven’t seen before.
  • Any kitchen catastrophe that the Echo Show undergoes will result in an arduous repair. The display is adhered very tightly in the midframe, and the glass digitizer needs to be removed in order to access anything. Cutting through and replacing lots of tough adhesive is not fun. With that, the Amazon Echo Show earns a 4 out of 10 on our repairability scale.

Check out the full Amazon Echo Show teardown for even more analysis and pretty disassembly images.