Kindle Fire HD Teardown
The Kindle Fire HD has landed on the doorstep of iFixit. Naturally, we've embarked on the epic voyage of exploring the electronic innards of the Kindle Fire HD. What will we find? Follow along as we methodically break down each component.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of an iFixit ritual with Amazon hardware: the site's teardown of the original Kindle Fire in November 2011 pegged its build cost at roughly $203, turning a consumer gadget into a margin story, and days later it did the same to Barnes & Noble's rival in the Nook Tablet teardown. The Galaxy Tab teardown back in November 2010 established the format for Android tablets generally.
The Kindle Fire HD arrives into that frame as Amazon's refreshed answer in the sub-$200 tablet fight, and the pickup list — Engadget, Mashable, TechSpot, Liliputing and others all running the same disassembly on or about September 17, 2012 — shows how reliably teardown content travels across both Android-leaning and mainstream outlets.
First-order effects
- Component-by-component photography puts the Fire HD's supply chain on display within days of launch, giving analysts and competitors a read on which parts Amazon chose and what the bill of materials implies about its pricing strategy, just as the $203 estimate did for the first Fire.
- The published disassembly gives buyers and repair shops their first look at how serviceable the device is — battery access, fastener choices, glued parts — before purchase decisions peak for the holiday season.
Second-order effects
- Barnes & Noble faces the same treatment by precedent: once one 7-inch tablet is opened up and costed, pressure builds to run the comparison against the Nook Tablet line, making component sourcing a visible competitive axis between the two.
- Suppliers identifiable in the photos gain or lose standing in the next design cycle, since OEMs like Amazon know teardown sites will name the chips and memory inside each shipping unit.
Third-order effects
- If every major tablet launch now triggers a same-week teardown, bill-of-materials transparency becomes a structural feature of the consumer electronics market — pricing power shifts toward whoever can open the box fastest, and repairability becomes a public scorecard manufacturers are judged on at launch rather than after.
The trend: Tablet launches have settled into a fixed cadence where independent teardowns turn each new device's internals and implied margins into public information within days of release.