Xbox One hit the stores last night, and iFixit has done a teardown of the innards of what it calls “America’s favorite surveillance system — the second-generation Kinect,” the motion-sensing and voice-recognizing camera for the Microsoft’s video game console.
And the repair service happily reports, “Good news, tin-hat wearers: The Kinect does not have any National Security Agency-grade hardware inside.” That’s a tongue-in-cheek joke about fears that Microsoft had created an always-on, always-watching-you device in your living room with the Kinect motion sensor, which has a high-definition camera in it.
The Kinect also has an infrared camera and three infrared emitters. The internal design is “less convoluted than the original.” That means replacement parts are possible. But you can’t get these parts off the shelf, and you’ll void the warranty if you open up the device to get to the parts. On that front, iFixit gave Kinect a “respectable, if not stellar, 6 out of 10 repairability score.”
The device has two long and two short T10 Security Torx screws under a tamper-evident sticker. It has a 5-volt fan made by Nidec. Chips include one designed by Microsoft, dubbed Microsoft X871141-001, that replaces the previous motion-sensor chip made by PrimeSense in the old Kinect from 2010. It was manufactured STMicroelectrnics.
It also has 128MB of main memory in the form of Samsung K4B1G1646G 1 Gb DDR3 SDRAM. And it has a Texas Instruments TPS54325 chip. The Chipworks analysis says this is an adaptive on-time D-CAP2 mode synchronous buck converter. Microsoft says that the new Kinect has three times the fidelity of the old Kinect, as it has a wider viewing angle and can sense up to six people at once.