Get another glimpse inside the PlayStation 5 with iFixit’s new teardown

iFixit has released its teardown of the PlayStation 5 and its DualSense controller — and it goes into even more detail than the one Sony did earlier this year. The gadget repair company discovered that the console has a ton of screws holding it together, and that there’s a weird catch to replacing the optical drive.

Photo: Creative Electron (via iFixit)

It turns out that the optical drive is software-locked to the motherboard. The physical swap is apparently a piece of cake, but any replacement you put in won’t read disks, so if your optical drive fails you’ll be sending it to Sony. It’s a bummer, especially for me: I’ve had terrible luck with PlayStation optical drives, and the only drive I haven’t had to replace is the one on my PS4 (which was only a few years old when I sold it).