Transcript
[0:00] Music.
[0:08] Well, it's that time of the week again, it's time for Chit Chat Across the Pond. This is episode number 753 for November 30th, 2022, and I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. This week, our guest is Nick of Nick's HomePod Repair. You might remember the article that Steve wrote about his amazing experience with Nick repairing our big girl home pod, I don't know,
like around a month ago. It wasn't just that some guy repaired our home pod, it was how he did it and how he broadcast live video of the repair as it was happening that it made it so much more interesting. I wanted to know more about how Nick got into doing this and how he creates his videos,
so I thought it'd be fun if he came on the show to talk to us all about it.
With that, welcome to the show Nick.
Hi, thanks and it's an honor to be here actually. Oh good, good. Well, I gotta tell you, Steve just loved everything about the experience with,
having you repair it and it seems like a funny thing to be excited about a repair, but the way you do it is so interesting. It was really, really fun.
[1:03] Oh yeah, absolutely. And just the, like seeing that reaction that people get when they get it back and they're like, wow, this is actually working again. And then being able to relive that experience that they had with their home pod and that they enjoy so much. It's all worth it.
Yeah. Well, let's start. I want to get a little background on you. Are you a tech technician or an engineer by trade, or did you just figure it out? How'd you get into this?
Well, my normal day job is actually a sales engineer. So I work a lot with like software and just basic computer troubleshooting on a day to day basis. But I've always been a
sort of tinker in my own free time. Anytime any of my own stuff breaks or any of my friend's stuff breaks, they usually come to me to get it fixed. But I was never really much into actual like micro soldering and like actual board level repair. But I did watch a lot of like,
Lewis Rossman and Northridge Fix and you know those kinds of channels. And I always wanted to,
sort of start up my own kind of repair business but I wasn't really sure exactly how I was going to do it. I couldn't just like start up a website and say hey I'll fix anything you send in right.
Because there's plenty of people out there and honestly for most things I feel like people should probably just go to someone with the experience working on your specific thing if you really care about it.
[2:30] What I did to actually get started and to sort of build up the confidence into like feeling like I could actually charge people money for this as a service was I would just go around social media like Reddit and Twitter and look for people that were saying that their stuff, their home pod was broken.
And I would just let them know, hey, if you cover shipping both ways, I'll fix it for you. And yeah, sort of built up the experience from there.
And yeah.
Well, that's crazy. crazy. Before we get into the details of how you do it and what you do, one thing Steve wanted me to ask you about, your website is nixfix.com and it's really, really well designed. It's very Apple,
like with these cool animations and graphics. He wanted to know, did you design this yourself or?
No, no, no, no, no. So what I actually did was I used this internet tool called the Wayback Machine.
I don't know if you've used it before. Oh, yeah.
[3:25] I was able to use that to pull up the old version of Apple's original HomePod website back when they originally launched it and sold it and such.
And I really liked the original design of that website.
[3:39] There were a few things here and there that they changed throughout that I didn't really like. There wasn't a single version that I liked the whole thing of.
So what I actually did was I downloaded a few different versions of the website that I liked, basically and then merged them all into one version and then replaced most of the assets with my own stuff, which is what took about half the time.
And then the other half of the time was fixing all the bugs from the site because it seems like there was a lot of stuff broken in there, which that could have been the way that the site was backed up to Wayback Machine or it could have been the way that it originally was, who knows?
I wonder, are you old enough to know what the Wayback Machine comes from, where that name comes from? No, actually.
So there was a cartoon when I was a little kid called a bowl winkle. And on bowl winkle, they had a guy named Mr. P body.
And it was kind of like a sub cartoon, like a cartoon within a cartoon. And he would, he had a way back machine where he would travel back in time and go, we would learn about the ancient Romans or whatever as little kids.
And now that's where it comes from. So that was kind of, kind of a fun little throwback for us, old people.
[4:45] That's good. So Apple never had a repair program for the HomePods, which was inexplicable. I mean, everything they make has that I know of that they ever made has some kind of repair program.
But here we paid all this money for these really cool devices. They were not inexpensive.
And yet when they died, they were just, you're done. It's over.
So how did you figure out how to fix them if Apple apparently was baffled by how to do it?
[5:14] So I actually didn't think that they were any more fixable than most other people at first. But after I bought my first HomePod for myself and I was like, wow, this is awesome.
I want more of this, but I don't want to pay full price for it because honestly, they're kind of they're they're fair. Chuck could change a piece. Right.
So I was I was looking into broken ones to buy for myself as a sort of like cheaper way to get my hands on more of them to try to fix for myself.
Okay. So from there, I went on to YouTube and Google and just searched around for any information I could find on anybody else that's already taken these apart and done any repairs on them.
And that's where I found this YouTube video from a channel I believe called Electronics Repair School.
And they're the ones who took apart, albeit not in the best way, but they managed to get whole pot apart and they identified the specific part inside that failed and caused a no power issue.
[6:15] So is that what most of the failures are is just simply no power? Yes.
And that's, that's what I came to learn after I bought a few broken ones for myself. After seeing that video, I was curious how common is this actually? Is this, is it the same failure in most of these or not?
And sure enough, um, pod after pod that I kept getting with no power, it was usually the same problem.
Ah. Oh, that's really interesting. Okay, so they had a way of opening them that you don't approve of, but they did find the root cause and then you were able to replicate the repair that they suggested?
Yes, and credit where it's due, I don't know, but I believe at the time there wasn't really a known way of getting into them very gracefully.
So his troubleshooting skills are far up there with the best.
But I think it wasn't for at least a few months after that until somebody else named OwitmeNick put up their own guide on iFixit on how to actually disassemble the HomePod without destroying it.
[7:26] Oh, okay. So that is that's available on iFixit? Yes. So if you look up iFixit HomePod info, you'll find two guides on their website, you'll find their original disassembly, or their original teardown video, I should say,
their teardown guides aren't disassembly guides, they're teardowns to show you, you know, the guts of the product before everybody before anybody else gets their hands on it.
And then there's OhitMeNix guide on there on how you can actually take the thing apart and be able to put it back together again without any leftover pieces or damage really.
Those are critical pieces right there. Okay. And I've actually got both of those guides linked within the same paragraph near the top of my website. So, okay.
So the guide that you pointed to, because Steve said you had posted a guide, that's That's actually the iFixit guide from OhitMeNick.
Yep, both of those guides. It's actually, I'll pull up my website here.
[8:26] I go to track 44.
[8:29] It says, yeah, the first set of words there, when HomePod first released, everyone thought total destruction was required. And that's the link to iFixit's first attempt.
And then it says, thanks to OhitMeNick's work, that's his guide there.
[8:44] Oh, okay. Okay, well, so Steve is an electrical engineer with a master's degree, albeit more theoretical type work than technician level work.
But you know, he knows his way around a soldering iron, but he watched you do a repair and he looked at Oatmeanick's guides and he basically said, nope.
Soldering surface mount parts was a bridge too far even for him. So I was really hoping this would be a project that would keep him busy and out of my way for months. And that's not how it worked out. and went, hey look, I could just pay this really small fee to Nick and he'll do it for me.
No, see, it's my first time taking my first home pod apart. It must have taken me a few hours just to get that first piece of plastic off. And I was sweating bullets doing it.
And then I didn't even have a hot air station at the time. I just had a soldering, a plain old soldering iron.
And I just wanted to really prove it to myself. Like, can I actually fix this or not?
[9:42] And what I ended up doing was not being able to remove the original dead diode off the board.
With my soldering iron. But what I ended up doing was something rather janky was just taking a knife and just sort of like stabbing the diode into pieces, breaking the pocket. Oh, because it's already dead.
Yeah, I was like, it's already broken. So, and I was able to confirm with the multimeter beforehand that the diode was in fact shorted out. So I had, I had moderate to high hopes that this might actually work.
And then I soldered the new diode basically on top of the remnants of the old one with my iron, plugged everything in and it fired right up. And I was just, I was, oh, it was amazing. It was such an amazing feeling.
I was immediately like, I gotta get my hands on more of these and see if this is like a common thing or not. And maybe like repair this for other people. I might've just found my niche here.
[10:34] So have you graduated beyond stab it with a knife? Oh yeah. As soon as I saw that thing power on, I hopped on Amazon and I bought a hot air station so I could do it more often without going through that again.
What's a hot air station? I've never heard of that.
So a hot air station or basically just a hot air reflow station or a hot air gun. You hear people call them different things, but it's essentially just a mini heat gun. and you have different size nozzles that you can put on the end of it to focus the area of heat that you're putting out of it.
And it's temperature controlled and airflow controlled, so you can more or less choose how much you bake your components.
Okay, and which components you bake?
Exactly, yeah. Because that's important for not frying a whole bunch of other stuff. Exactly, and it's a lot easier using that tool to transfer a lot of heat through the parts than it is with a tiny little soldering iron.
You can cover a wider area, especially reaching solder pads that you can't even reach under components that are like surface mounted.
[11:39] You need hot air to remove a lot of those components. You just can't take a soldering iron and get to some of those parts.
Oh, I didn't think about that. I was thinking that you were trying to focus to a smaller area, but you're actually trying to focus on a larger area because you need a couple of things to come undone at the same time.
Yep, so if you just purely heat up the diode itself, if you manage to get the heat small enough to just focus on there,
you're probably gonna have a lot harder time, if at all, ever getting that diode off because the board itself is acting as a heat sink and it's pulling all of that heat and basically sucking it all the way from your diode.
So you wanna sort of get some of the surrounding board area at least a little warm so that way when you're trying to take it off, it's less time with total like intense heat.
You want to minimize how much time you're putting your board under heat.
[12:32] Wow. So much goes into just that one piece of the repair is just this little diode. Where did you find the diodes themselves? So they just normal components you can buy online?
They're pretty standard. Oh yeah. Off the shelf you can get them for around a dollar a piece, more or less depending on how many you buy, you can get a discount. I end up having to buy them like one to 200 at a time now. Just so I make sure I don't run out before like 10 pods show up in a a day.
Wow, that's funny. Now beyond the hot air system, are there any other specialized tools that you use? I wouldn't really, I don't think I have any specialized tools at all that I use.
The hot air gun is really, I think the most specialized one. Aside from that, I regularly use the flat head screwdriver to pry the basket off.
And then I've got the T6 Torx screwdriver for the majority of the screws in the thing, which is, might I make the point that it's an interesting, the HomePod itself is like a really interesting dichotomy of both repairability and irreparability.
Because they use the same T6 Torx bit throughout all the screws in the thing to get it apart.
But then they glue the thing together.
[13:50] And then they don't let you restore the software in them. So if you ever have any software issues with it, it's a brick.
Oh wow. So do you see any reason why they're glued?
I mean...
It's like these go through big vibe. I mean, they do go through vibration cars by themselves, but you don't have them on a boat usually or a train or, you know, they sit in a kitchen or
something. So what's interesting is the part that they glue together doesn't seem to have any immediate functionality. So it doesn't actually do anything to seal the the home pod together.
[14:28] It seems that all it does is hold that plastic down, that top half of the plastic to the bottom half of the plastic.
Underneath of it, there's an actual gasket that does the actual job of sealing the subwoofer into the pod so it doesn't leak sound out.
So I've done a side by side comparison of one with that's never been opened up and one that I've actually cleaned all of the glue out of and put back together again. And there's absolutely no difference.
Perhaps they might be thinking long-term durability. Maybe as that original rubber gasket fails, they're thinking the silicone adhesive might act as a backup.
Maybe they're thinking over time it'll start to build tolerances and start to rattle.
So the glue might stop that.
I'm not really sure.
But- So if we get back to the diode then, when we talk about durability, Did they just get a bad batch of diodes or is that diode in particular pretty error prone?
Like are we going to be in constant communication once a year we get to send our home pod to you or what do you think? So unfortunately, I don't really know for certain.
It is at the very least a strange coincidence that out of the hundreds that have showed up for repair.
[15:49] All of the ones with no power have a date code on the diode between 1746 or 1748K. That just simply means when the diode was manufactured.
We've had, again, a few hundred other HomePods in for unrelated issues that powered on just fine.
[16:09] But those diodes have date codes far older or newer than that, that continue to work just fine.
So correlation isn't always causation, right? So we got to be careful there before we assume there's a bad batch of those diodes just because we see so many of those fail.
Because we simply don't know how many of those diodes in total were used throughout the whole production.
A simple explanation could just be that they used or they had more of those in that date range so they made more of them with that.
So we're gonna see more of those ones fail. But it still doesn't really explain why I still haven't seen any of them outside of that date range fail when I see so many of them outside of that date range still.
Yeah, yeah. I did want to ask one thing for the audience that aren't electrical engineers or technicians. What does a diode look like?
How big is it? So it's roughly about half a centimeter long by...
[17:16] A quarter of a centimeter. There's dials and all sorts of things. A teeny little thing. Yeah, it's small. It's smaller than your fingernail, like a quarter of the size of your fingernail for sure.
Okay. Okay. Just want people to have an image in their head of what these things look like.
So we shipped our, the way your service works, we pay for shipping to and fro. And one of the things Steve was also excited about was you tipped him off to, I guess you You tip everybody off to a site called PirateShip.com,
and it's a place that shows you the best price to ship the thing you're trying to ship.
And if nothing else, that was worth the price of admission because we're always seeing they're going, oh, do I really want to go research all these sites and find out the right one.
PirateShip.com takes you right there.
[18:01] So we pay to ship it to you, we pay to ship it back, and then, which was pretty surprisingly inexpensive because of that site.
And then what's the repair cost for just the, if it's the diode problem?
Yeah, so not just the diode problem, but majority of repairs are $60 flat rate. It doesn't matter how long it takes. And to a degree, it doesn't matter what needs to be replaced or repaired on the board or in the pod.
The only time repairs are more expensive is if the subwoofer speaker needs to be replaced. Some people send theirs in for like base issues or no base entirely.
And it's a complete toss-up. Sometimes the bass speakers totally fine still and it's reusable and other times it's the cause of the, or it's one of the symptoms of the no bass is the speaker itself is actually bad. So that's an extra 20.
[18:56] That's only an extra 20 bucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I try to keep everything reasonable, but I try to keep my pricing reasonable such that even for people shipping internationally, it's competitive when you factor in the shipping costs,
versus paying Apple for an out of warranty replacement just to get something with the same potentially faulty parts.
[19:19] Yeah, I'm looking up what did these normally cost $350? I think they were $400 when they started, but $359 was the last price. And so $60 to replace a $350 device, that is an absolute
steal. It's a no-brainer, we thought. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And even if you want to go on eBay or Facebook and you see somebody selling like a broken HomePod for an absolute steal. Let's say you pay
somebody $100 even for a broken HomePod. And then that's 25 to 40 bucks in shipping both ways,
$60 for the repairs. You're still out the door far less than you would be buying a working used one off somebody else or a brand new one from Apple.
Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. So are there any kind of repairs that you can't do? Like do you ever get them where you're like, nope, can't fix it?
[20:18] Yes, unfortunately, there's one major sort of umbrella issue that I sort of put a few sub issues under and that's essentially software issues. So if for whatever reason the and the HomePod needs its software restored,
there's nothing we can do about that.
[20:39] What's frustrating really is underneath the HomePod's rubber base, there are debug pins and those allow you to connect physically to the HomePod via USB or UART protocol.
And what's even more interesting is if you solder a USB cable to those pins and connect it to your computer, be it a Windows or Mac, iTunes and Finder actually recognize a HomePod is connected.
[21:08] Take it a step further, the UI actually even gives you a button to restore. You click restore, and then it says the software could not be found.
[21:19] So all of these HomePods that people get where their power accidentally goes out during a software update, or the software update just doesn't go as planned and it bricks itself.
Or you come home from work one day and your volume buttons are now blinking and there's nothing you can do about it.
Unfortunately, it's that close. It seems physically possible, but there's- You can taste it, it's so close.
There's just no access to the IPSW file that you do happen to currently have access to with pretty much every other Apple product out there,
like your iPhones, your Apple watches, your iPads.
All of those have files that you can currently download publicly and use them to restore your device. even the HomePod Mini.
You have access to the files that you need to plug it into your computer and restore the software. Oh, just not the big home.
Just not the big one. I kind of understand why they wouldn't allow like, why it's just not like publicly available per se.
[22:26] Because like for a customer to rip the bottom of the HomePod off, you know, you... And solder on the pins.
Yeah. Yeah. I could imagine they could have sold an adapter and made a slight alteration to the design in the first place. And at the very least, the stores could restore the software on them, but instead they're telling people to go kick a bag of pods.
[22:52] Hey, so I wonder if under right to repair, that could force Apple Sand to release it.
[23:02] That's a good question. So maybe iFixit could ask for you.
[23:09] I thought about it a lot and at the end of the day, I can't stop thinking of how Apple could justify it one way or the other that technically it's as repairable as legally required because there's nothing stopping us from opening it up and doing whatever we physically want to it.
Software-wise, they can continue to claim that there's... I forget what's the word for it, But basically, they don't want their proprietary software and goody goods getting out and people.
[23:44] Making knockoff stuff and reverse engineering it and all that.
But you can get the IPSW for the HomePod Mini.
[23:51] You can, yes.
[23:53] All right. It's now my mission in life to find it for you. I will hopefully never need it, but I want you to have it. I want it to be out there where you're using it.
Oh, you and so many others. I bet. So have you done any repairs on HomePod minis?
[24:08] I have actually. Not very many, just for myself, but I bought five minis off eBay for, I think, like 10 or 20 bucks a piece. It was a lot of them. They were all described as won't power on.
And I got them. I plugged them into a power brick. None of them showed anything. And then I plugged them into my MacBook and they allowed me to restore the software on them and they all worked just fine.
Oh wow. Just like that. Oh that's interesting. Yeah, it's amazing.
So once you restored the software then you could plug them into a power brick and they worked. Yep, they worked just fine. They still work just fine actually. That was five or six months ago by now.
Oh, so that's a hot tip. Go looking on eBay for HomePod minis that won't power up. Hey, if you're willing to take the gamble, 10 or 20 bucks per HomePod Mini versus like 40 or 50 bucks at least used per one, that's a fun little gamble to me.
Yeah, yeah, that makes me want to go buy some more. I like sprinkling them around the house. I don't even listen to music, but I've got them all over the place.
[25:12] Well, so now that we've gotten into this part, I want to talk about the way you actually do the repair and the hilarious fun thing that you do is you live stream every single repair and you tell people, okay, I'm repairing yours right now.
And so you can watch it live and it says Steve's HomePod and you do this running commentary. What made you think to do that? That's just such a fun thing.
Well, when I was a little kid, one of my favorite things was going with my parents to the mechanic and whenever they are like the tire shop or whatever.
And it was really cool to be able to sit in the lobby and watch them working on your car.
And that was always really cool. And then fast forward a bunch of years, I'm watching Lewis Rossman and Northridge Fix on YouTube do all these repairs.
And I've always kind of wanted to do something like that.
[26:09] But like I said earlier, I wasn't really sure how I could break into that sort of market and really get any business at all because there are already so many other people out there with far more experience than I do fixing a lot of stuff, but not for HomePods.
So I saw that as an opportunity to sort of take over that and fill that void. I think there's something fun about that from the producer's perspective, which is what you are in this case.
I did my show, I do a bunch of podcasts, but I did them all just solo sitting in front of a microphone for many, many years.
And then somebody said, oh, you should do your show live. And I thought, well, all right, I'll just broadcast the creation of the show. It's not the show itself, but it's the creation of the show.
And this audience gathered around me and it suddenly became more fun. Every Sunday night, I get to go hang out with these people. I've got friends that are chatting with me and it's a really, really good time.
And it changed the nature of producing the show. Every once in a while, I have to do the show without the live audience and it's really lonely and boring and I don't like it.
And so I imagine maybe it's a little bit like that for you.
Oh yeah. I've got quite a few recurring viewers and it's so cool to see people pop in and say, I started watching like your show now like every day or.
[27:35] People come popping in to ask questions about doing their own repairs I absolutely love helping people if they're doing if they're they're working on their own. Oh.
[27:44] That's cool. That's really cool I think Steve's favorite part was when you were working on his you you were examining it and you sniffed it and you said Smells fresh. Is there some kind of story behind that? Oh,
Uh, not really.
Uh, I-I just, uh, let's see.
Do you just love the smell of electronics? Yes, I really like the smells of a lot of things, I guess. I guess that you could say I'm a little passionate about my senses. But in particular with the subwoofer speaker, if it's burnt out.
[28:22] I'll say this. A bad smelling speaker won't pass, but a good smelling speaker might still not pass.
So if it smells bad, I'm definitely replacing it.
It's always good to sniff that subwoofer. I was thinking maybe it was smokers or something. Like you got somebody to have a smoker's house. Like, ew.
No, no. Actually, one of those broken home pod minis that I got smelled absolutely phenomenal. And sometimes I can kind of guess what room people had their pod in based on the smell.
[28:56] You can tell if they had it in the kitchen. It also sometimes has a bit of a greasy film on it.
Other times it's got more like a floral or like a hairspray smell. You know those came from the bathroom.
Interesting. So you really are checking out. Well, good. I guess our kitchen passed muster because it's on top of the fridge until it croaked on us.
That's so funny. How interesting. There's another video you have. You have a trailer video called Massacre Found Inside a HomePod.
We put a link to this in the show notes, but it's hilarious. Describe it and what the heck had happened to that HomePod.
That was one that I had bought for myself off eBay described as obviously for parts of repair not working, won't power on. When I got it, there was no obvious damage on the outside.
[29:53] When I cracked it open, it had looked like somebody had shaken it up with a bunch of salt water on the inside and let it dry out and corrode.
Once I really got into there, I found the power supply's main capacitor had blown up and leaked its juice or whatever all over the insides and just completely wrecked the,
whole thing from the inside out.
It is, the video is hilarious because it's done at a macro level and he's just traveling along all these components and they just look horrible.
[30:31] Oh man, as soon as I saw that, that was the music that was playing in my head was, this is insane. That's great.
Okay, so when you're doing the repairs, you've got multi-angle camera shoots. Can you talk about how you do that?
Yeah, so I originally started off with just a couple smartphones. I had my iPhone 11 and my Note 8.
Using an application called DroidCam for OBS. And I have those all plugged into my machine via USB,
and they allow me to use my phone camera as a video source for OBS Studio, which is the software that I use to live stream and record my repairs.
[31:15] So also it's a nice little bonus instead of going out and dropping a couple hundred dollars on a USB webcam that's gonna give me equal or lesser quality, why not utilize the pretty decent camera in my smartphone?
So that's what I started off with.
And then recently I got myself the Sony ZV-E10 for my overhead camera view, because I needed something with a more powerful optical zoom and flexibility to zoom in and out of the top view desk workspace.
Oh, okay. Okay. So are you actively changing that while you're working?
Yeah, so depending on how close I want people to be in on from the top view, I will use the physical zoom on the camera, which is just right above the desk. So even when I'm sitting down, I can reach up there. And then I've also got...
And then in OBS, which by the way is an open source broadcasting application that a lot of podcasters use, that's for the audience, you can see the camera zooming in and out so you can tell what you're doing?
Oh yeah, I've got a monitor right in front of the workspace that shows me real-time what my view looks like and then I've got a second monitor to the side to see how the YouTube feed is going and keeping up with the chat.
[32:36] Okay, okay, so you're actually watching chat as you're doing this too. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
But you've got a side view too, right? So I've got, imagine the arm that you've got for your microphone there but with a phone mount.
[32:52] I've got about three or four of those mounted around my desk, so that way I can move my phones around at different angles.
I've actually got also a piece of glass that sits about six feet above my workspace desk that I've got a bunch of other tools clamped to for anytime I want to stick a camera somewhere and get a specific angle.
I like to play with the video setup and tweak it a lot.
That is really fun. this glass above you. So is that just a place to leave things in that way you can grab them?
Yep, it's a multipurpose. It's an easy place to grab things. It's where the overhead camera is mounted and I've got a couple other computers there, just as sort of an aesthetic thing.
[33:36] That's an interesting idea. I'd never thought of something like that. That's really cool.
[33:42] You said you do get real-time feedback. People are commenting as you're streaming the repairs. Oh yeah, no, and I keep up on the chat as much as I can. People are, you know, they come in and say,
hey, thanks for the tip. I got my pod fixed. Thanks to your information. Or they're asking for help. They're stuck on a specific step or they might've broken something and they're asking for,
a part for me to send to them. Or they're just saying, this is fun. Yeah.
[34:08] I think you embody what's so fun about the internet. I mean, people talk all the time about the pad parts, but the internet is amazing that it's filled with so many people who love,
what they do and want to share that information. I just don't run into people that often who are proprietary about what they know. You could say, no, no, I'm not going to teach you anything because
I want all the business, but what fun would that be, right? No, I want competition. I'm still waiting for someone within the US to reach out to me and say, hey, would you mind putting me up on on your website as a repair partner, perhaps.
No, yeah.
But the way I see it, it's no different for me as it is any other big or small business.
Like, competition is good. And being like an honest and transparent business and just like there's no sense in withholding anything because the harder you try to withhold something, the harder someone else is gonna try to get it from you.
[35:05] That's a good point. And by sharing information, you're encouraging other people to share with you. I'm sure if somebody figures something out that would make your life easier, they would let you know.
That's the whole point of being alive, isn't it? Is progressing and making everything easier for everybody else to come. So I love that. I love that. Well, I do want to, I didn't have it in the notes,
but I do want to talk about how do you open a home pod? So all I see is this plastic disc on top, and then this netting and then the bottom is stuck on and then the and of course a power cord is
hardwired so you can't replace it. How do you get them open? So you can actually replace the power cable to start. Really? To remove the power cable just set it on your table, firmly hold it down
with one hand at the top of the pod to the table and then wrap the power cable a few times around your other hand and then build up a little bit of slack,
I just yank it right out.
No way. Yeah, and it'll pop right out. It's just a regular connector. It's not a standard connector, but you can hop on eBay or wherever you can find spare parts for these things, which isn't very many places,
but you can buy replacement power cables for these too.
I've been using the same power cable for my repair testing here since I started and it's holding up just fine.
[36:25] Oh wow. Okay, so I remember seeing that this netting thing come off was Steve's favorite party kept replaying it over and over again for me. So how do you get the plastic piece off the top that's got the buttons?
Yeah, so you start with something that you can get a grip, like a flat plastic or metal tool that you can get a nice grip on to cut the adhesive that's holding that top plastic layer on. Okay. And you don't want to you don't want to use anything to pry that plastic off.
What you want to do is cut through the adhesive. Keep going around and cutting through the adhesive until it just gives up and it basically pops off on its own. Okay. That's the biggest mistake that
I see people make in resulting in scratching and cracking their tops. So, okay. Okay. Just keep that But keep that pry tool level with the plastic top.
Go around a few times and cut that adhesive off. And then once you get that plastic off, it's pretty much T6 screws and a little bit of prying here and there to get the rest of the way in.
There's a few screws holding the drawstring tight at the top.
It's a drawstring? Yep. Once you take those out, the top of the mesh loosens up and you can slide it down towards to the bottom of the HomePod,
revealing the whole top half of the pod and the screws holding the basket and the subwoofer in and the logic board and all that.
So once you're that far.
[37:54] And you continue taking your screws out, you're at the tough part, which is prying that top basket off of the bottom half of the pod.
And that's where you take your flat head and a wedge it in between the subwoofer and the plastic frame and sort of split the two halves apart, break that glue holding the two together apart.
And as I say in the stream, if it doesn't sound like an Xbox 360 when you're taking it apart, you might not be doing it right.
[38:22] What do you mean by that? So the glue can be very strong and it can make some very concerning noises as you're opening them up sometimes.
It sounds a lot like an Xbox 360 if you've ever taken one of those apart.
It sounds like you're breaking the thing, but you're really not. It's just the glue.
Is it screaming in death or something? Yeah.
So once you've gone past the hard part, it's all pretty much downhill from there. You can unscrew the subwoofer and lift that out.
You can reach in there, get the power supply out, and then get to the amplifier, which is usually where most of your problems are gonna be.
[39:02] Okay, wow. It really is funny watching that netting open up. It just goes whoosh and disappears.
Oh, it's so satisfying. Sometimes I make little sound effects like, whoosh.
[39:16] It's a satisfying experience to slide it down, and then when you're tightening it up again too, and you pull those drawstrings tight and get it looking factory again.
It's always so satisfying.
Oh yeah, ours was a little dented from the way he packed it with the power cord. He had it in the original box, but it was a little bit dented and you were like, oh, let me shape you back the way you're supposed to look. Like you cared about it. It was pretty funny.
Oh yeah, the HomePod didn't ask to be a HomePod. It just is. So you got to take care of him.
[39:47] Nick, this was at least twice as fun as I hoped it would be. I hoped it would be nerdy, but I didn't realize that I would meet somebody who was just such a genuine person.
I'm really happy we had a chance to get together on this. This was awesome. Oh, thank you. And anytime you want me to come back, I'd be more than happy to.
Oh, maybe there'll be Q&A. So if people want to find your website one more time, where is it? You can go to nixfix.com. That's Nick without a K. nixfix.com.
Or you can just actually Google HomePod repair and track44.moe.com.au will be one of the first results that shows up and you can click on that and it'll take you there.
[40:28] All right. Well, that sounds pretty easy for people. One more time. Thank you so much for coming on.
I hope we don't need your work again, but if we do, I know where I'm going to go. There's absolutely no doubt. I suspect you might get some more business from this.
Awesome. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure being on here in an honor again.
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[41:42] Music.