Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

Not being able to solder puts a hard cap on the kinds of devices you can fix at home. As more modern devices add in circuit boards and discrete electronics (needed or otherwise), soldering is often the only way to save an otherwise functional object from ending up in a junk drawer, or landfill.

That's the kind of roadblock iFixit's FixHub is intended to address. The repair store and repairability advocate now offers battery-powered soldering tools and beginner's kits, intended to make soldering something you can do almost anywhere, quickly, with a few features intended to help out novices and those feeling a bit rusty.

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  iFixit's soldering tools are meant to be used together or separately. The battery pack can control the soldering iron temperature, but so can a browser. [credit: iFixit ]

iFixit, which says it is going "all-in on soldering" in a press release, offers a few interconnected pieces as part of a FixHub system:

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Introduction

Today, I picked up my Apple Vision Pro (AVP) at the Apple Store. I won’t bother you with yet another unboxing video. When you pick it up at the store, they give you a nice custom-made shopping bag for the AVP’s box (left). They give you about a 30-minute guided tour with a store-owned demo headset, and when you are all done with the tour, they give you yours in a sealed box.

iFixit asked if I would help identify some of the optics during their AVP “Extreme Unboxing” (it is Apple; we need a better word for “teardown”). I have helped iFixit in the past with their similar efforts on the Magic Leap One and Meta Quest Pro and readily agreed to help in any way that I could.

iFixit’s “Extreme Unboxing”

As per iFixit’s usual habit, they took the unboxing of a new product to the extreme. They published the first of several videos of their extreme unboxing of the AVP today (Feb. 3rd, 2023). You can expect more videos to follow.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing iFixit showed in the first iFixit video is that the Eyesight (front display) has more than a single lenticular lens in front of the Eyesight’s OLED display. There is a second lens-like element and/or a brightness enhancement film (BEF). BEF films a series of triangular refraction elements that act in one direction, similar to a lenticular lens.

iFixit also showed a glimpse of the AVP’s pancake optics and the OLED microdisplay used for each eye toward the end of the video. The AVP uses pancake optics as described in Apple Vision Pro (Part 4) – Hypervision Pancake Optics Analysis.

Closing

That’s it for today. I mostly wanted to let everyone know about the iFixit extreme unboxing. I have a lot of work to do to analyze the Apple Vision Pro.