Break It Better.
The Robin Proline Compact doorbell is the only HomeKit doorbell that supports PoE (Power over Ethernet), as of March 2023. Here’s a look inside it.
The motherboard sits on 6 plastic standoffs. Not pictured here are some plastic M3 bolts that fasten the PCB. Beware that one of the black standoffs is longer than the rest despite looking similar.
The camera lens is assembled with the green motherboard. There is a small wire harness that connects the white daughterboard.
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I will outline what Huawei has and has not fixed in the 2019 MateBook X Pro compared to the 2018 model. You can find the more obvious talking points on The Verge and other normie sites, but here are the small engineering changes that I noticed during my teardown and testing.
Screenshot from my teardown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxf_bU6OZXE&t=11974s
Previously, the Huawei MateBook X Pro’s speakers would produce distortion because they rattled against the laptop body. As shown in this unit purchased in November, Huawei has addressed this issue by putting small pieces of foam underneath the speakers. Is this because they saw my original post, where I both pointed out the issue and introduced this very solution? We may never know.
The bottom lid: 4 Phillips screws hidden under the rubber strip/foot, 2 T5 screws on the bottom corners. HP, fuck you for hiding screws under the rubber foot, and for double-fooling people by putting them under only one of the two strips.
Forget CPU and GPU thermal throttling — charge rate throttling is now a thing.
Exposed charging circuit with shielding cover peeled off. Plugged in, CPU idle.
If you want to improve the MateBook X Pro’s overall thermal performance (CPU, GPU, etc), see the full mod guide.
The only heatsink in this laptop is this big metal plate. In most laptops, a fan or two blow directly through a stacked-fin heatsink in a process called forced convection cooling. In the X Pro, heat spreads across the metal plate with the heatpipes' help, warming up the air inside the laptop. The small fan exhausts all this hot air and brings in new cool air using negative air pressure. It also generates some, but not enough, airflow across the heatsink plate.
The miserably small fan can spin at nearly 9,000 RPM, but the bar under it (where a heatsink with fins would usually be) is just one of the WiFi antennas.
The fan is the model BAZA0504R5H made by Asia Vital Components and rated at 5V 0.5A. This means it could theoretically use 2.5W when spinning at max speed (which happens to be around 8800RPM).
Look at how thin the fan is!
The fan has a sealed bearing.
The fan motor is 3-phase with 6 poles.
The copper base plate for the CPU.
Behind the keyboard is a pyrolytic graphite sheet to spread heat more evenly across the keyboard area.
See the motherboard with the heatsink off. The Nvidia MX150 GPU gets a thermal pad as if it were an Intel iGPU.
The back of the motherboard is covered with a plastic insulator film.
This is the motherboard's back with the plastic film removed.
The Nvidia MX150 (1D12 10W version) and its VRAM.
The motherboard has good component density. It's also the thinnest I've seen. The coil whine is insane on my unit.
The pop-up webcam's bottom and the springs for reducing the display cable's slack.
The WiFi card (Intel AC-8275) is non-replaceable.
Although the SSD is awkwardly under the heatsink, it can be wiggled straight out. I bought my X Pro on Taobao.com in China and it came with with a Samsung PM981.
The speakers under the speaker grill are tiny tweeters.
The tweeters fire upward through the grill, and they have a thin fabric filter cover.
Most of the sound comes from the bottom-facing speakers instead, which have much larger enclosures.
There is a cavity on each side of the touchpad, underneath the battery. The speakers could have extended into it like in the late-2017 HP Spectre X360 13t. Poor use of space? A little bit.
The hinges uses a simple rivet.
The display ribbon cables are similar to those of post-2016 MateBook Pros.
Huawei reportedly probed Apple suppliers to learn their display cable design (the one involved in #flexgate). As far as I know, this is the first laptop outside of MacBooks that houses the display controller inside the main body instead of the display assembly.
Unlike the MateBook X, there are no screws under the rubber feet. Instead, there are many plastic tabs that hold the back plate firm.
The back cover has many foam pads that press against the internals.
If your touchpad is loose or rattles, read this.
If you want to get rid of throttling and unlock more performance, read this.
The stock Samsung PM961 SSD has been replaced with a 960 Pro in my Yoga 720.
Update: This is actually a bad idea. I ended up using Netgear’s stock heatsink with Fujipoly XR-m thermal pads. It runs the coolest (below 60℃) and retains the router’s original aesthetics.
