The HTC Vive gets the teardown treatment

It’s been a long time coming, but the HTC Vive is finally in the hands of consumers, and we all know what that means. Yup, breakage. Regardless of how hardy the HTC Vive is, Joe Public will find a way to break it. Which then means a repair bill, resulting in a lot of angst. Luckily, the guys at iFixit have taken a look inside the HTC Vive to access its repairability, giving it a surprisingly good score.

The HTC Vive has been given a repairability score of eight out of ten, which is pretty good considering its complexity. It took 25 steps to disassemble the Vive down to its component state, with iFixit saying that although it’s a complicated device, it is possible to break it down without damaging the VR wearable. Unlike the Oculus Rift that uses a desk-mounted camera to track the IR emitters, the HTC Vive “sees light from its mounted IR emitters without actually tracking its location”.

With 2 1080p AMOLED displays providing the visuals at a combined resolution of 2160 x 1200, a built-in camera and microphone, accelerometer, gyroscope, and laser positioning sensors, as wells as IR emitters, the HTC Vive is not a cheap piece of kit. Indeed, it comes in at $799/£695 and represents a hefty investment. Despite the price, the HTC received more than 15,000 preorders for the Vive in just ten minutes. Click the source link below to check out the full teardown, step-by-step.