PBK Review
What’s in the Pixel 6a? PBK Reviews has got hold of the device and has broken it down. It has pretty basic internals for a pretty basic phone.
The screen is glued and has plastic reinforcing clips. Once warmed up and removed, you’ll be greeted with a large graphite heatsink. Like the larger Pixel 6s, the motherboard has the USB-C port glued to it, which will make repairs to the port more difficult than a plug-in solution.
The back is plastic and peels off just like the front, with a little glue and plastic clips to beat. Once you remove the back from the frame, it is extremely bent. There’s also a suspiciously large notch on the Pixel 6a’s frame that PBK Reviews says was intended at one point for wireless charging, but the phone never shipped with that feature.
Advertising
For whatever reason, iFixit no longer does Pixel teardowns (despite an official partnership with Google for parts, oddly enough), but PBK gives the phone a repairability score of 7 out of 10. Port C and a fingerprint reader that likely won’t be separated from the screen without damaging it. For the Pixel 6 Pro, PBK Reviews questioned the copious amount of adhesive used to hold the battery down. Removing it required soaking the battery in alcohol and a lot of prying. On the Pixel 6a, the battery just pops out when you pull the pull tab, which is a nice improvement.
We also see the first sign of Google’s shaky quality control, with PBK saying his unit arrived scratched due to some debris in the box. We’ll know more when the phone starts shipping on July 28.
