 Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat Across the Pond. This is episode number 753 for November 30th, 2022. And I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week, our guest is Nick of Nick's HomePod Repair. You might remember the article that Steve wrote about his amazing experience with Nick repairing our big girl HomePod, I don't know, like around a month ago. It wasn't just that some guy repaired our HomePod. It was how he did it and how he broadcast live video of the repair as it was happening that it made it so much more interesting. I wanted to know more about how Nick got into doing this and how he creates his videos. So I thought it'd be fun if he came on the show to talk to us all about it. With that, welcome to the show, Nick. Hi, thanks, and it's an honor to be here, actually. Oh, good, good. Well, I gotta tell you, Steve just loved everything about the experience with having you repair it. And it seems like a funny thing to be excited about a repair, but the way you do it is so interesting. It was really, really fun. Oh yeah, absolutely. And just seeing that reaction that people get when they get it back, and they're like, wow, this is actually working again, and them being able to relive that experience that they had with their HomePod and that they enjoy so much. It's all worth it. Yeah, well, let's start. I wanna get a little background on you. Are you a technician or an engineer by trade or did you just figure it out? How did you get into this? Well, my normal day job is actually a sales engineer. So I work a lot with software and just basic computer troubleshooting on a day-to-day basis. But I've always been a sort of tinker in my own free time. Anytime any of my own stuff breaks or any of my friend's stuff breaks, they usually come to me to get it fixed. But I was never really much into actual micro soldering and actual board level repair. But I did watch a lot of Lewis Rossman and Northridge fix and those kinds of channels. And I always wanted to sort of start up my own kind of repair business, but I wasn't really sure exactly how I was gonna do it. I couldn't just like start up a website and say, hey, I'll fix anything you send in, right? Cause there's plenty of people out there. And honestly, for most things, I feel like people should probably just go to someone with the experience working on your specific thing if you really like care about it. So what I did to actually get started and to sort of build up the confidence into like feeling like I could actually charge people money for this as a service was I would just go around social media like Reddit and Twitter and look for people that were saying that their home pod was broken. And I would just let them know, hey, if you cover shipping both ways, I'll fix it for you. And yeah, sort of built up the experience from there. And yeah. That's crazy. Before we get into the details of how you do it and what you do, one thing Steve wanted me to ask you about, your website is nixfix.com. And it's really, really well designed. It's very Apple-like with these cool animations and graphics. He wanted to know, did you design this yourself or? No, no, no, no. So what I actually did was I used this internet tool called the Wayback Machine. I don't know if you've ever used it before. I was able to use that to pull up the old version of Apple's original HomePod website back when they originally launched it and sold it and such. And I really liked the original design of that website. There were a few things here and there that they changed throughout that I didn't really like. There wasn't a single version that I liked the whole thing of. So what I actually did was I downloaded a few different versions of the website that I liked basically and then merged them all into one version and then replaced most of the assets with my own stuff, which is what took about half the time. And then the other half of the time was fixing all the bugs from the site because it seems like there was a lot of stuff broken in there, which that could have been the way that the site was backed up to Wayback Machine or it could have been the way that it originally was. Who knows? I wonder, are you old enough to know what the Wayback Machine comes from, where that name comes from? No, actually. So there was a cartoon when I was a little kid called Bullwinkle. And on Bullwinkle, they had a guy named Mr. Peabody and it was kind of like a sub cartoon, like a cartoon within a cartoon. And he had a Wayback Machine where he would travel back in time and go, we would learn about the ancient Romans or whatever as little kids. And now that's where it comes from. So that was kind of a fun little throwback for us, old people. That's good. So Apple never had a repair program for the home pods, which was inexplicable. I mean, everything they make has, that I know of that they ever made has some kind of repair program. But here we paid all this money for these really cool devices. They were not inexpensive. And yet when they died, they were just, you're done. It's over. So how did you figure out how to fix them if Apple apparently was baffled by how to do it? So I actually didn't think that they were any more fixable than most other people at first. But after I bought my first home pod for myself and I was like, wow, this is awesome. I want more of this. But I don't want to pay full price for it because honestly, they're kind of, they're a fair chunk of change of piece, right? So I was looking into broken ones to buy for myself as a sort of like cheaper way to get my hands on more of them to try to fix for myself. Okay. So from there, I went onto YouTube and Google and just searched around for any information I could find on anybody else that's already taken these apart and done any repairs on them. And that's where I found this YouTube video from a channel I believe called Electronics Repair School. And they're the ones who took a part, albeit not in the best way, but they managed to get a home pod apart and they identified the specific part inside that failed and caused a no power issue. So is that what most of the failures are is just simply no power? Yes. And that's what I came to learn after I bought a few broken ones for myself after seeing that video, I was curious, how common is this actually? Is it the same failure and most of these are not? And sure enough, pod after pod that I kept getting with no power, it was usually the same problem. Oh, that's really interesting. Okay, so they had a way of opening them that you don't approve of, but they did find the root cause and then you were able to replicate in the repair that they suggested. Yes, and credit words do, I don't know, but I believe at the time, there wasn't really a known way of getting into them very gracefully. So his troubleshooting skills are far up there with the best. But I think it wasn't for at least a few months after that until somebody else named Oh, It Me Nick put up their own guide on iFixit on how to actually disassemble the HomePod without destroying it. Oh, okay, so that's available on iFixit? Yes, so if you look up iFixit HomePod info, you'll find two guides on their website. You'll find their original disassembly or their original teardown video, I should say. Their teardown guides aren't disassembly guides. They're teardowns to show you the guts of the product before anybody else gets their hands on it. And then there's Oh, It Me Nick's guide on there on how you can actually take the thing apart and be able to put it back together again without any leftover pieces or damage, really. Those are critical pieces right there, okay. And I've actually got both of those guides linked within the same paragraph near the top of my website, so. Oh, okay, so the guide that you pointed to, because Steve said you had posted a guide. That's actually the iFixit guide from Oh, It Me Nick. Yep, both of those guides. It's actually, I'll pull up my website here. I go to track 44. It says, yeah, the first set of words there when HomePod first released, everyone thought total destruction was required, and that's the link to iFixit's first attempt. And then it says, thanks to Oh, It Me Nick's work, that's his guide there. Oh, okay, okay. Well, so Steve, Steve is an electrical engineer with a master's degree, albeit more theoretical type work than technician level work, but he knows his way around a soldering iron, but he watched you do a repair and he looked at Oh, It Me Nick's guides and he basically said, nope. The soldering surface mount parts was a bridge too far even for him. So I was really hoping this would be a project that would keep him busy and out of my way for months, and that's not how it worked out. He went, hey, look, I could just pay this really small fee to Nick and he'll do it for me. No, see, it's my first time taking my first HomePod apart. It must have taken me a few hours just to get that first piece of plastic off. And I was sweating bullets doing it. And then I didn't even have a hot air station at the time, I just had a plain old soldering iron. And I just wanted to really prove it to myself, like, can I actually fix this or not? And what I ended up doing was not being able to remove the original dead diode off the board with my soldering iron. But what I ended up doing was something rather janky was just taking a knife and just sort of like stabbing the diode into pieces, breaking the pocket. Oh, because it's already dead. Yeah, I was like, it's already broken. And I was able to confirm with a multimeter beforehand that the diode was in fact shorted out. So I had moderate to high hopes that this might actually work. And then I soldered the new diode basically on top of the remnants of the old one with my iron, plugged everything in and it fired right up. And I was just, I was, oh, it was amazing. It was such an amazing feeling. I was immediately like, I gotta get my hands on more of these and see if this is like a common thing or not and maybe like repair this for other people. I might've just found my niche here. So have you graduated beyond stab it with a knife? Oh yeah. As soon as I saw that thing power on, I hopped on Amazon and I bought a hot air station so I could do it, do it more often without going through that again. What's a hot air station? I've never heard of that. So a hot air station or basically just a hot air reflow station or a hot air gun. You hear people call them different things but it's essentially just a mini heat gun. And you have different sized nozzles that you can put on the end of it to focus the area of heat that you're putting out of it. And it's temperature controlled and air flow controlled so you can more or less choose how much you bake your components. Okay, and which components you bake? Yeah, exactly, yeah. Because that's important for not frying a whole bunch of other stuff. Exactly, and it's a lot easier using that tool to transfer a lot of heat through the parts than it is with a tiny little soldering iron. You can cover a wider area, especially reaching solder pads that you can't even reach under components that are like surface mounted. You need hot air to remove a lot of those components. You just can't take a soldering iron and get to some of those parts. Oh, I didn't think about that. I was thinking that you were trying to focus to a smaller area, but you're actually trying to focus on a larger area because you need a couple of things to come undone at the same time. Yep, so if you just purely heat up the diode itself, if you manage to get the heat small enough to just focus on there, you're probably gonna have a lot harder time if at all ever getting that diode off because the board itself is acting as a heat sink and it's pulling all of that heat and basically sucking it all away from your diode. So you wanna sort of get some of the surrounding board area at least a little warm, so that way when you're trying to take it off, it's less time with total intense heat. You wanna minimize how much time you're putting your board under heat. Wow, so much goes into just that one piece of the repair is just this little diode. Where did you find the diodes themselves? So they just normal components you can buy online? They're pretty standard. Oh yeah, off the shelf you can get them for around a dollar a piece more or less depending on how many you buy, you can get a discount. I end up having to buy them like one to 200 at a time now, just so I make sure I don't run out before like 10 pods show up in a day. Wow, that's funny. Now beyond the hot air system, are there any other specialized tools that you use? I wouldn't really, I don't think I have any specialized tools at all that I use. The hot air gun is really, I think the most specialized one. Aside from that, I regularly use the flat head screwdriver to pry the basket off. And then I've got the T6 Torx screwdriver for the majority of the screws in the thing, which is, might I make the point that it's an interesting, the home pod itself is like a really interesting dichotomy of both repairability and irreparability. Because they use the same T6 Torx bit throughout all the screws in the thing to get it apart, but then they glue the thing together. And then they don't let you restore the software on them. So if you ever have any software issues with it, it's a brick. Oh wow. So do you see any reason why they're glued or, I mean, it's not like these go through big vibe. I mean, they do go through vibration crisis by themselves. But you don't have them on a boat usually or a train or, you know, they sit in a kitchen or something. So what's interesting is the part that they glue together doesn't seem to have any immediate functionality. So it doesn't actually do anything to seal the home pod together. It seems that all it does is hold that plastic down, that top half of the plastic to the bottom half of the plastic. Underneath of it, there's an actual gasket that does the actual job of sealing the subwoofer into the pod so it doesn't leak sound out. So and I've done a side-by-side comparison of one with, that's never been opened up and one that I've actually cleaned all of the glue out of and put back together again. And there's absolutely no difference. Perhaps they might be thinking long-term durability, maybe as that original rubber gasket fails, they're thinking the silicone adhesive might act as a backup. Maybe they're thinking over time, it'll start to build tolerances and start to rattle so the glue might stop that. I'm not really sure. But... So if we get back to the diode then, when we talk about durability, did they just get a bad batch of diodes or is that diode in particular pretty error prone? Like are we gonna be in constant communication once a year, we get to send our home pod to you or what do you think? So unfortunately, I don't really know for certain. It is at the very least a strange coincidence that out of the hundreds that have showed up for repair, all of the ones with no power have a date code on the diode between 1746 or 1748K. That just simply means when the diode was manufactured. And we've had, again, a few hundred other home pods in for unrelated issues that powered on just fine, but those diodes have date codes far older or newer than that that continue to work just fine. So correlation is an always causation, right? So we got to be careful there before we assume there's a bad batch of those diodes just because we see so many of those fail. Because we simply don't know how many of those diodes in total were used throughout the whole production. A simple explanation could just be that they used or they had more of those in that date range. So they made more of them with that. So we're going to see more of those ones fail. But it still doesn't really explain why I still haven't seen any of them outside of that date range fail when I see so many of them outside of that date range still. Yeah, yeah. I did want to ask one thing for the audience that aren't electrical engineers or technicians. What does a diode look like? How big is it? So it's roughly about half a centimeter long by a quarter of a centimeter. There's diodes. A teeny little thing. Yeah, it's small. It's smaller than your fingernail. Like a quarter of the size of your fingernail for sure. Okay, okay. Just want people to have an image in their head of what these things look like. So we shipped our, the way your service works, we pay for shipping to and fro. And one of the things Steve was also excited about was you tip him off to a, I guess you tip everybody off to a site called pirateship.com. And it's a place that shows you the best price to ship the thing you're trying to ship. And if nothing else, that was worth the price of admission, because we're always saying, they're going, oh, I really want to go research all these sites and find out the right one. Pirateship.com takes you right there. So we paid a ship it to you. We paid a ship it back. And then, which was pretty surprisingly inexpensive because that site. And then what's the repair cost for, just if it's the diode problem? Yeah, so not just the diode problem, but majority of repairs are $60 flat rate. It doesn't matter how long it takes. And to a degree, it doesn't matter what needs to be replaced or repaired on the board or in the pod. The only time repairs are more expensive is if the subwoofer speaker needs to be replaced. Some people send theirs in for base issues or no base entirely. And it's a complete toss-up. Sometimes the base speakers totally fine still and it's reusable. And other times, it's the cause of the no, or it's one of the symptoms of the no base as the speaker itself is actually bad. So that's an extra 20. That's only an extra 20 bucks. Yeah, yeah. I try to keep everything reasonable, but I try to keep my pricing reasonable such that even for people shipping internationally, it's competitive when you factor in the shipping costs versus paying Apple for an out-of-warranty replacement just to get something with the same potentially faulty parts. Yeah, I mean, looking up, what did these normally cost $350? I think they were $400 when they started, but $359 was the last price. And so 60 bucks to replace a $350 device, that is an absolute steal. It's a no-brainer, we thought. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And even if you want to go on eBay or Facebook and you see somebody selling like a broken home pod for an absolute steal, let's say you pay somebody $100 even for a broken home pod. And then that's 25 to 40 bucks in shipping both ways, 60 dollars for the repairs. You're still out the door far less than you would be buying a working used one off somebody else or a brand new one from Apple. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. So are there any kind of repairs that you can't do? Like, do you ever get them where you're like, nope, can't fix it? Yes, unfortunately, there's one major sort of break or umbrella issue that I sort of put a few sub-issues under and that's essentially software issues. So if for whatever reason the home pod needs that software restored, there's nothing we can do about that. What's frustrating really is underneath the home pods rubber base, there are debug pins and those allow you to connect physically to the home pod via USB or UART protocol. And what's even more interesting is if you solder a USB cable to those pins and connect it to your computer via a Windows or Mac, iTunes and Finder actually recognize a home pod is connected. Take it a step further, the UI actually even gives you a button to restore. You click restore and then it says the software could not be found. So all of these home pods that people get where their power accidentally goes out during a software update or the software update just doesn't go as planned and it breaks itself or you come home from work one day and your volume buttons are now blinking and there's nothing you can do about it. Unfortunately, it's that close. It seems physically possible, but there's- You can taste it, it's so close. There's just no access to the IPSW file that you do happen to currently have access with pretty much every other Apple product out there like your iPhones, your Apple Watches, your iPads. All of those have files that you can currently download publicly and use them to restore your device. Even the HomePod Mini, you have access to the files that you need to plug it into your computer and restore the software. Oh, just not the big home pod. Just not the big one. I kind of understand why it's just not publicly available, per se, because for a customer to rip the bottom of the HomePod off, you know you- And solder out the pins. Yeah, I could imagine they could have sold an adapter and made a slight alteration to the design in the first place and at the very least, the stores could restore the software on them. But instead, they're telling people to go kick a bag of pods. Hey, so I wonder if thunder right to repair there that could force Apple's hand to release it. That's a good question. So maybe I fix it could ask for you. I thought about it a lot. And at the end of the day, I can't stop thinking of how Apple can could justify it one way or the other, that technically it's as repairable as legally required because there's nothing stopping us from opening it up and doing whatever we physically want to it. Software-wise, they can they can continue to claim that, you know, there's I forget what's the word for it. But basically, they don't care. Exactly. They don't want their proprietary software and and and, you know, goody goods getting out and people making knockoff stuff and reverse engineering it and all that. But you can get the IPSW for the HomePod Mini. You can, yes. All right, it's now my mission in life to find it for you. I will never hopefully never need it, but I want you to have it. I want it to be out there where you're using it. Oh, you and so many others. I bet. So I have you done any repairs on HomePod Minis? I have actually not very many just for myself, but I bought five minis off eBay for, I think, like 10 or 20 bucks a piece. It was a lot of them. They were all described as won't power on and I got them. I plugged them into a power brick. None of them showed anything. And then I plugged them into my MacBook and they allowed me to restore the software on them and they all they all worked just fine. Oh, wow. Just like that. So that's interesting. Yes, it's amazing. So once once you restored the software, then you could plug them into a power brick and they worked. Yep, they worked just fine. They still work just fine, actually. That was five or six months ago by now. Oh, so that's a hot tip. Go looking on eBay for HomePod Minis that have no that won't power up. Hey, if you're willing to take the gamble, 10 or 20 bucks per HomePod Mini versus like 40 or 50 bucks, at least used per one. That's that's a fun little gamble to me. Yeah, yeah. That makes me want to go buy some more. I like sprinkling them around the house. I don't even listen to music, but I've got them all over the place. Well, so now that we've gotten into this part, I want to I want to talk about the the way you actually do the repair. And the the hilarious fun thing that you do is you live stream every single repair and you tell people, OK, I'm repairing yours right now. And so you can watch it live. And it says Steve's HomePod and you do this running commentary. How did what made you think to do that? That's just such a fun thing. Well, when I was a little kid, one of my favorite things was going with my parents to the mechanic and whenever they are like the tire shop or whatever. And it was really cool to be able to sit in the lobby and watch them working on your car. And, you know, that that was always that was always really cool. And then fast forward a bunch of years, you know, I'm I'm watching Lewis Rossman and Northridge fix on YouTube. Do all these repairs? And, you know, I've always kind of wanted to do something like that. But like I said earlier, I wasn't really sure how I could break into that sort of market and and really get any any business at all. Because there are already so many other people out there with far more experience than I do fixing a lot of stuff, but not for HomePods. So I saw that as an opportunity to sort of take over that and fill that void. I think there's there's something fun about that from from the producer's perspective, which is what you are in this case, I had did my show. I do a bunch of podcasts, but I did them all just solo sitting in front of a microphone for many, many years. And then somebody said, oh, you should do your show live. And I thought, well, all right, I'll go, I'll just broadcast the creation of the show. It's not the show itself, but it's the creation of the show. And this audience gathered around me and it suddenly became more fun every Sunday night. I get to go hang out with these people. I've got friends that are chatting with me and it's a really, really good time. And it changed the nature of producing the show. Every once in a while, I have to do the show without the live audience. And it's really lonely and boring and I don't like it. And so I imagine maybe it's a little bit like that for you. Oh, yeah, I've got I've got quite a few recurring viewers. And it's it's so cool to see people pop in and say, hey, I started watching like your show now, like every day or people popping in to ask questions about doing their own repairs. I absolutely love helping people if they're doing if they're they're working on their own. Oh, that's cool. That's really cool. I think Steve's favorite part was when you were working on his you you were examining it and you sniffed it and you said it smells fresh. Is there some kind of story behind that? Oh, not really. I just let's see. Do you just love the smell of electronics? Yes, I I I really like the smells of a lot of things, I guess. I guess that you could say I'm a little passionate about my my senses. So, but in particular, with the subwoofer speaker, if it's burnt out, I'll say this. A bad smelling speaker won't pass, but a good smelling speaker might still not pass. OK, so if it smells bad, I'm definitely replacing it. OK, OK, it's it's always good to sniff that subwoofer. I was thinking maybe it was it was smokers or something like you got some smokers house like you. No, no, actually, one of those broken homepods that I got smelled absolutely phenomenal. And sometimes you can I can kind of tell I can kind of guess what room people had their pot in based on the smell. You can you can tell if they had it like in the kitchen, because it's and it also sometimes has a bit of like a greasy like film on it. And then other times it's got like a more like a floral or like a like a hairspray smell. You know, those came from. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, how interesting. So you really are checking out. Well, good. I guess our kitchen passed muster because it's on top of the fridge till it till it croaked on us. That's so funny. How interesting. Yeah, so there was another another video you have. You have a trailer video called Massacre Found Inside a Home Pod. And we put a link to this in the will be in the show notes, but it's hilarious. Describe it and what the heck had happened to that home pod? So that was one that I had bought for myself off eBay, described as obviously for parts of repair, not working with power on that when I got it, there was no obvious damage on the outside. When I cracked it open, it had looked like somebody had shaken it up with a bunch of like salt water on the inside and let it dry out and corrode. Once I really got into there, I found the power supplies main capacitor had blown up and leaked its juice or whatever all over the insides and just completely wrecked the whole thing from the inside out. It is the video is hilarious because it's done at a macro level and he's and he's just traveling along all these all these components and they just look horrible. Oh, man, as soon as I saw that, that was the music that was playing in my head was this is insane. That's great. OK, so when you're doing the repairs, you've got multi-angle camera shoots. Can you talk about how you do that? Yeah, so I originally started off with just a couple of smartphones. I had my iPhone 11 and my Note 8 using an application called DroidCam for OBS. And I have those all plugged into my machine via USB and they allow me to use my phone camera as a video source for OBS Studio, which is the software that I use to live stream and record my repairs. So also, it's it's a nice little bonus instead of going out and dropping a couple hundred dollars on a USB webcam that's going to give me equal or lesser quality. Why not utilize the pretty decent camera in my in my smartphone? So that's what I started off with. And then recently, I got myself the Sony ZV-E10 for my overhead camera view because I needed something with a more powerful optical zoom and flexibility to zoom in and out of the top view desk workspace. Oh, OK, OK. So are you actively changing that while you're you're working? Yeah, so depending on, you know, how close I want people to be in on from the top view, I will use the physical zoom on the camera, which is just right above the desk. So even with when I'm sitting down, I can reach up there. And then I've also got you can see in and then in OBS which, by the way, is an open source broadcasting application that a lot of podcasters use. That's for the audience. They you can see the camera zooming in and out so you can tell what you're doing. Oh, yeah, I've got a monitor right in front of the workspace that shows me real time what my view looks like. And then I've got a second monitor to the side to see how the YouTube feed is going and keeping up with the chat. OK, OK, so you're actually watching chat as you're doing this, too. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But you've got a side view, too, right? Yes. So I've got imagine the arm that you've got for your microphone there, but with a phone mount. I've got about three or four of those mounted around my desk so that way I can move my phones around at different angles. I've actually got also a piece of glass that sits above about six feet above my workspace desk that I've got a bunch of other tools clamped to for anytime I want to stick a camera somewhere and get a specific angle. I like to play with the video set up and tweak it a lot. So that is really fun. So this this glass above you, so is that just a place to leave things in that way you can grab them? Yep, it's it's it's a multi purpose. It's an easy place to grab things. It's where the overhead camera is mounted and I've got a couple other computers there, just a sort of an aesthetic thing. But yeah, that's an interesting idea. I'd never thought of something like that. That's that's really cool. You said you do get real time feedback. People are commenting as you as you're streaming the repairs. Oh, yeah, no, I and I keep up on the chat as much as I can. People are, you know, they come in and say, hey, thanks for the tip. I got my pod fixed thanks to your information or they're asking for help. They're stuck on a specific step or they might have broken something and they're asking for a part for me to send to them. They're they're just saying this is fun. Yeah. I think you embody what's what's so fun about the Internet. I mean, people talk all the time about the pad parts, but it's the Internet is amazing that there's filled. It's filled with so many people who love what they do and want to share that information. It's not I just don't run into people that often who are proprietary about what they know. You know, you could say, no, no, I'm not going to teach you anything because I want all the business. But what fun would that be? Right? No, I want competition. I'm still waiting for someone within the U.S. to reach out to me and say, hey, would you mind putting me up on your website as a repair partner? Perhaps not. Yeah. But but I the way I see it, it's, you know, no different for me as it is any other big or small business like competition is good. And, you know, being like an like an honest and transparent like business and just like there's no sense in withholding anything because the harder you try to withhold something, the harder someone else is going to try to get it from you. That's a good point. And by sharing information, you're encouraging other people to share with you. I'm sure if somebody figures something out that would make your life easier, they would let you know. That's the whole point of being alive, isn't it? Is progressing and making everything easier for everybody else to come. So I love that. I love that. Well, I do want to I didn't have it in the notes, but I do want to talk about how do you open a home pod? So all I see is this plastic disc on top and then this netting. And then the bottom is stuck on. And then the and of course, a power cord is hardwired, so you can't replace it. How do you get them open? So you can actually replace the power cable to start. Really, to remove the power cable, just set it on your table. Firmly hold it down with one hand at the top of the pod to the table and then wrap the power cable a few times around your other hand and then build up a little bit of slack and just yank it right out. No way. Yeah. And it'll just a regular connector. Just it's not a standard connector, of course. But you can hop on eBay or wherever you can find spare parts for these things, which isn't very, very many places. But you can buy replacement power cables for these two. And I've been using the same power cable for my repair testing here since I started and it's holding up just fine. So. Oh, wow. OK. So I remember seeing that this netting thing come off was Steve's favorite party kept replaying it over and over again for me. So you get how do you get the plastic piece off the top that's got the buttons? Yeah. So you start with something that you can get a grip like a flat plastic or metal tool that you can get a nice grip on to cut the adhesive that's holding that top plastic layer on. OK. And you don't want to you don't want to use anything to pry that plastic off. What you want to do is cut through the adhesive. Keep going around and cutting through the adhesive until it just gives up and it basically pops off on its own. OK. That's the biggest mistake that I see people make in resulting in scratching and cracking their tops. So OK, OK, just keep that. Keep that pry tool level with the plastic top. Go around a few times and cut that adhesive off. And then once you get that plastic off, it's pretty much T6 screws and a little bit of prying here and there to get the rest of the way in. There's a few screws holding the draw string tight at the top. It's a string. Yep. Once you take those out, the top of the mesh loosens up and you can slide it down towards the bottom of the home pod, revealing the whole top half of the pod and the screws holding the basket and the subwoofer in and the logic board and all that. So once you're that far and you continue taking your screws out, you're at the tough part, which is prying that top basket off of the bottom half of the pod. And that's where you take your flathead and a wedge it in between the subwoofer and the plastic frame and sort of split the two halves apart and break that glue holding the two together apart. And as I say in the stream, if it doesn't sound like an Xbox 360, when you're taking it apart, you might not be doing it right. What do you mean by that? So the glue can be very strong and it can make some very concerning noises as you're as you're opening them up sometimes. It sounds a lot like an Xbox 360 if you've ever taken one of those apart. It sounds like you're breaking the thing, but you're really not. It's just the glue screaming and death or something. Yeah. So once you've gone past the hard part, it's all pretty much downhill from there. You can unscrew the subwoofer and lift that out. You can reach in there, get the power supply out and then get to the amplifier, which is usually where most of your problems are going to be. OK. Wow. I it really is funny watching that that netting open up. It just it just goes. Oh, it's so satisfying. Sometimes I make I make little sound effects like. It's it's it's a satisfying experience to slide it down. And then when you're tightening it up again to and you pull those drawstrings tight and get it looking factory again, it's always so satisfying. Oh, yeah. Ours was a little dented from the way he packed it with the power cord. He had it in the original box, but but it was a little bit dented. And you were like, oh, let me let me shape you back the way you're supposed to look like you like you cared about it. It was it was pretty funny. Oh, yeah, the home pod didn't ask to be a home pod. It just is. So you got to take care of him. Like this was at least twice as fun as I hoped it would be. I hoped it would be nerdy, but I didn't realize that I would meet somebody who was just such a genuine person. I I'm really happy we had a chance to get together on this. This was awesome. Oh, thank you. And any time you want me to come back, I'd be more than happy to. Oh, maybe there would be Q&A. So if people want to find your website one more time, where is it? You can go to nixfix.com. That's Nick without a K, nixfix.com. Or you can just actually Google HomePod Repair and track44.moe slash home pods will be one of the first results that shows up and you can click on that and it'll take you there. All right. Well, that sounds pretty easy for people. One more time. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope we don't need your your work again. But if we do, I know where I'm going to go. There's absolutely no doubt. And I suspect you might get some more business from this. Awesome. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure being on here in an honor again. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chachat Across the Pond. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because the show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the Podfeat podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeat.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're going to find different ways to contribute. If you like to do a one time donation, you can click the PayPal button. If you want to make a recurring contribution, click the weekly Patreon button. Or another way to contribute is to record a listener contribution. It's a great way to help the NoCillicastAways learn from you. If you want to contact me for any reason, you can email me at Allison at podfeat.com. You can follow me on Twitter at podfeat. Maybe you want to talk to other NoCillicastAways. You can do that in our Slack group at podfeat.com slash Slack. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.