iFixit is a great outfit that takes hardware apart and tells you a bit more about the insides. We’ve all heard of food porn and what iFixit does can be described as chip porn. When they take apart Apple products they can confirm things that Apple doesn’t want to reveal, eg. The amount of RAM.
When it comes to the Nexus 9 teardown we were not surprised by the insides of this overhyped tablet. In short you will find an 8.9" IPS LCD with a resolution of 2048x1536, 2 GB RAM, 8 megapixel f/2.4 rear-facing camera + 1.6 megapixel front-facing camera, 802.11ac 2x2 (MIMO) Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 4.1 + NFC, 16 or 32 GB on-board storage and 64-bit NVIDIA Tegra K1 dual-core processor running at 2.3 GHz, paired with a 192-core Kepler GPU.
It looks like you can take the back cover off with the help of your nails, you don’t even need tools to do it, but we definitely want to be careful. It is easy to remove the back facing camera and the rear cover has an NFC antenna and nothing more on it. The camera has an f/2.4, 29.2 mm lens (35 mm equivalent) and is labelled 3BA804P1 K1419 A 1.0. It turns out that HTC Desire 610 has the same camera. Google is using a 3.8V, 6700 mAh battery that takes up quite a bit of space. The iPad Air 2 has a 7340mAh battery while iPad Mini Retina display has a 6471mAh battery, so the Nexus 9 battery is right in between these two popular tablets.
The most interesting part is the printed circuit board that has more than seven chips. The most important one is the Nvidia Tegra K1 Dual Denver 64-bit Processor (labelled as T4K885 01P TD590D-A3). This is world's custom 64-bit processor for Android. The scores are all over the place, from being the fastest to being among slowest, depending on how the test is optimised, but overall Denver Tegra K1 64-bit delivers exceptional performance on the Nexus 9.
The Elpida / Micron Technology FA164A2MA 16 Gb (2 GB) market orange is the name of the RAM chip, while Samsung makes the flash memory designated KLMAG2GEAC 16 Gb eMMC NAND Flash and market yellow in the teardown. The tablet relies on Broadcom’s BCM4354XKUBG MIMO 5G Wi-Fi 802.11ac/Bluetooth 4.0/FM Module marked green. There are three more chips Texas Instruments TI47CFP91 T65913B3D9, 20795P1 KML1G TD1431 402391 1W and Broadcom BCM4752 Integrated Multi-Constellation GNSS Receive that are a bit less interesting to us.
The LCD uses Synaptics S7504B 43210570 Touchscreen Controller and the sad news is that the LCD is glued to the glass and in case you break the glass of the LCD, you will have to change both.
iFixit it gives the tablet a rather reparability score of 3 out of 10, mainly due to the fact that HTC and Google decided to glue a lot of components and a lot of small PCBs at the corners. At least it is easy to open the rear side of the tablet and access the battery, but the battery itself is glued and not that easy to replace. We sincerely hope that you will never have to see the inside of your Nexus 9.
