Moto 360 wristputer batt boob, elderly internals revealed in teardown iFixit's teardown of Motorola's Moto 360 smartwatch has raised eyebrows after revealing a seemingly smaller-than-advertised battery and some very aged components. Moto 360 battery Can't fit 320mHa on there? Er, use a smaller font, maybe? The team took apart the new Android-powered smartwatch and found that the battery, …
Slap-dash PCB production much?
No, it's par for the course with SMD production - components can move around a little during soldering since they are briefly floating on liquid metal. The extent to which it is noticeable depends on the component and the geometry of both the pin and the pad. It's a feature of SMD manufacture generally, it just gets more noticeable when magnified several times.
It's more than that. Look at the SMD resistor to the left of the chip: It's so far off that it's now on the next components pad. This unit is probably not functioning properly anymore.
It could be from iFixit's heating of the smartwatch to get the glue loose, but that would be pretty aggressive heating.
The image there is after they've removed the memory chip from on top of the processor, so presumably more extreme heating (i.e. desoldering) was required for that.
Ahh, forgot TI's love for stacking chips on top of each other. The blast of a hot air gun would be enough to dislodge neighbouring components.
This would explain a lot. I was looking at those components and thinking, How is this thing even operable? BGAs are fussy beasts when it comes to alignment and one chip looked way off as did the discrete components (not sure if they're caps or resistors).
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