The folks over at iFixit have torn down the Nexus 6 to reveal its internals in all its glory. Unlike most of the other recent devices torn down by iFixit, the Nexus 6 managed to earn a fairly respectable repairability score of 7 out of 10.
Getting inside the Nexus 6 was pretty easy and only required the use of opening picks. However, once the iFixit team removed the back cover, they were greeted with 22 (!) T3 screws. After opening every single one of them, they proceeded to remove the mid frame from the display/front panel of the Nexus 6. The mid frame and the display of the Nexus 6 “practically falls apart into two halves,” which makes it clear why Motorola used so many screws on the handset.
Another advantage of Motorola using so many screws is that there is no use of adhesive, or plastic clips, which makes getting access to the innards of the device a fair bit easier.
In the end, iFixit gives the Nexus 6 a score of 7 out of 10 for repairability and notes that the “pressure contacts and cable connectors make the modular components easy to replace.” They did deduct a few points for the digitizer being fused to the display, which makes it a costly replacement job for cracked screens. Additionally, some parts like the vibrator, SIM card slot and the USB port are soldered directly to the motherboard of the device, which makes them more difficult to replace in case they start malfunctioning.
