To further complicate matters, Apple occasionally refers to these as “Pentalobe security screws.” Please don’t confuse them with security Torx. Apple would never use a real Torx security screw with a post for two reasons: they’re ugly, and the posts break off easily with screw heads this small. It’s certainly better than what I came up with, which was “Evil Proprietary Tamper Proof Five Point Screw.” It’s best I stay out of the naming business.Ĭontrary to what has been widely reported elswhere, this is not a security Torx screw. Apple’s service manuals refer to them as “Pentalobular” screws, which is a descriptive enough term. It’s similar to a Torx-except that the points have a rounder shape, and it has five points instead of six. This screw is the primary reason the 11″ MacBook Air earned a lousy repairability score of 4 out of 10 in our teardown last October.Īpple chose this fastener specifically because it was new, guaranteeing repair tools would be both rare and expensive. This isn’t the first time they’ve used this type of screw-it first appeared in the mid-2009 MacBook Pro to prevent you from replacing the battery-and Apple is using a similar screw on the outer case of the current MacBook Air. This is not a standard Torx, and there are no readily available screwdrivers that can remove it. An Evil AscendingĪpple is switching to a new type of tamper-resistant screw. I immediately noticed something odd about the Japanese phones: they had different screws on the bottom! These new screws looked like very small Torx (I guessed T3 at the time) but were actually something far more insidious. I didn’t need to buy a phone for myself, but I wanted to see the new iPhone firsthand. Once we finished the teardown, I hit the streets of Tokyo to watch the actual iPhone release and then hang out with the Apple community. The ease of disassembly gave me plenty of time to analyze the internals. Opening the phone entailed removing the two Phillips #00 screws on the bottom and then sliding off the back cover. The teardown was quite straightforward-the iPhone 4 was electronically complex, but easy to disassemble and work on. Rather than waiting in line at the Ginza Apple store, I worked on the teardown virtually from my Tokyo hotel room. We’re quick to adapt, and the rest of our teardown team got their hands on one of these early units. Much to the dismay of thousands of Japanese with similar intentions, my mission was thwarted: FedEx delivered hundreds of iPhone 4 boxes in California two days early. Expecting to be one of the first people in the world to buy the iPhone 4, I was dispatched to Japan for its release last June.
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December 2022
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