Amazon’s Echo speaker promises to make your life better by being a Siri for your kitchen, an always-listening assistant you can ask for help when your hands are covered in batter. The folks at iFixit got one, and naturally started ripping it apart. Once you dive in, it looks like spare parts for the Death Star.
In the course of their teardown, iFixit found pretty standard speaker tech, alongside a seven microphone array for listening to your every command, and an LED controller for Echo’s light up face-type-ring-of light. They also found that once you start tacking it apart, Echo looks a liiiiiiittle bit like Sauron’s fortress of Barad-dûr. Coincidence? God I hope so.
In the rest of the dissection, iFixit didn’t find much else surprising, and if you happen to find yourself repairing this speaker, it should be pretty easy; iFixit gave it repairability rating of 7 out of 10. But if you find yourself repairing a speaker you should probably reevaluate your life and what led you to that point afterwards. Hop over to iFixit to take a look at the rest of the pretty guts that are hiding out in the tower of darkness. Or as I am going to call it, the Ear of Bezos. [iFixit]