The Ware for July 2025 is shown below:

Thanks to FETguy and Renew Computers in San Rafael, California for contributing this ware!

The Ware for June 2025 is a Gentner EFT-900A frequency shifter for radio audio applications. According to Chris Combs, “it lets two parties send and receive ‘full-range audio’, whatever that means, compressed and then decompressed via the usual 300-3500hz phone line”. Even though Per named the ware first, I will give the prize to Kienan because the response addresses the theory of operation of the ware – shifting the audio up/down by 250Hz so that low-end audio isn’t lost on analog telephone lines. I found that bit very insightful, and now I don’t look at the ware the same way as I did before. Congrats, email me for your prize!

Also, this has never happened before, but the designer of the ware (Bill Gillman) made a cameo in the comment sections. I really enjoyed looking at the board, so as a token of thanks for designing such a nice ware, email me and I’ll also give you a prize.

The ware for June 2025 is shown below.

A big thanks to Chris Combs for this handsome contribution! Despite being 80’s vintage, the board is in mint condition.

The Ware for May 2025 is a Facebook (now Meta) Portal. I’ll give the prize to opticron for the quick guess, email me for your prize!

I actually considered redacting the audio DSP, but decided to leave it in because it’s an interesting detail. Despite having a big burly SoC with multiple cores and a GPU, the designers still opted to integrate a dedicated chip for audio DSP. I guess silicon has gotten cheap, and good software engineers have only gotten more expensive.

I’ll also give an honorable mention to Azeta for doing a great “spirit of the competition” analysis. Thanks for the contribution!

The Ware for May 2025 is shown below.

Because I really like to be able to read the part numbers on all the parts, here’s a couple more detail images of portions that didn’t photograph clearly in the above images.

This ware was donated to me by someone in person, but unfortunately the post-it note I had put on it to remind me who it was had long fallen off. My apologies; if you happen to see this, feel free to pop a note in the comments so you can be attributed for the contribution.

I made a point of not looking up the details of the ware before I did the teardown, so I could have a little fun figuring it out. While pulling it apart, the entire time I kept muttering to myself how this ware reeks of silicon valley startup with more money than sense. The hardware engineers who worked on this were clearly professional, well-trained, and clever; but also, whoever the product manager was had some Opinions about design, and incorporated lots of cost-intensive high-tech “flexes”, most of which I’m pretty sure went unappreciated and/or unnoticed by anyone other than someone like me taking the thing apart. For example, the board shown above is encased in a thixomolded two-part magnesium thermal frame with heat pipes, precision-machined thermal conduction blocks and gobs and gobs of thermal paste, which then necessitated a fairly tricky assembly procedure, and some brand-name custom-designed antennae to work around the Faraday cage caused by the metal casing. You’ll also note that despite the whole assembly being stuck in a metal case, each circuit subsystem still had an RF cage over it – so it’s metal cages inside a metal cage. This project must have had one heck of a tooling budget.

This was all for the sake of a “clean” design that lacked any visible screws. I’d say it also lacked visible cooling vents but ironically the final design had prominent ribbed structures, but they weren’t used for cooling – they were purely cosmetic and sealed over with an inner bezel. I feel like most of the cost for the thermal frame could have been avoided if they just let some air flow through the product, but someone, somewhere, in the decision chain had a very strong opinion about the need for a minimalist design that left little room for compromise. I would lay good money that the argument “but Apple does it this way” was used more than once to drive a design decision and/or shame an engineer into retracting a compromise proposal. Anyways, I found this product to be an entertaining case study in over-engineering.