Inside the Apple iPad: how one company got the photos first
Posted on 5 Apr 2010 at 09:14
iFixit was the first company to produce a "teardown" of the Apple iPad. We reveal how it got there before everyone else
The iPad finally hit US stores last Saturday, but the race to unlock its mysteries started several weeks ago in San Luis Obispo, a picturesque college town roughly 200 miles south of Apple's Silicon Valley headquarters.
On March 12, Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules woke up before dawn. Their plan demanded that they be among the first to get their hands on the device.
So at 5.30am, the minute Apple began taking iPad orders on its website, Wiens and Soules - do-it-yourself repair evangelists and co-founders of a company called iFixit - placed theirs. As delivery addresses, they entered several US locations where their research determined the iPad is likely to arrive soonest. They could tell you which ones, but they'd have to kill you.
Armed with heat guns, suction cups and other tools of the trade, the duo set out on Saturday to reveal some of the tablet's most closely guarded secrets: the design and components that make it tick. By the time the lines outside Apple Stores started to thin, iFixit had provided a blow-by-blow account of its "teardown" to the world, complete with a photo montage.
