we've toured factories before but somehow i've never even been to what is
arguably the electronics manufacturing capital of the world shenzhen china
so when oneplus offered to sponsor us behind the scenes for a close-up look at
their production lines for the oneplus 6 i couldn't resist
the first line behind me here is completely focused on building the
screen assembly which includes the OLED panel the digitizer and the glass front
and the chassis the oneplus 6 uses a sandwich style construction with an
aluminum mid plate and then a separate glass back plate this first station here
after earpiece speaker grille installation is dedicated just to
inspecting the chassis that are shipped here from foxconn by the way don't be
surprised if you buy from someone like oneplus and some of the components come
from foxconn their factories make pretty much everything but it's down to oneplus
to control the quality of the user experience so this guy right here is
checking every single unit to ensure
that it meets their standard and he's really picky so
a tiny imperfection like this
which is very hard for us to even capture with an 8k camera will result in
this unit being sent back for a refund
now the defect rate for a part like this is around 0.3 percent meaning that it's not
a huge issue on the surface but think about it if a phone requires let's say
six major components and each of them is bad 0.3 percent of the time then even if
everything else goes perfectly oneplus could end up building 2 out of every 100
of their phones with some kind of imperfection
totally unacceptable next the chassis and the display assembly get fed into
opposite sides of the glue applicator machine right here it uses machine
vision to precisely align them then it applies a special glue and then they get
left in a compression device for three hours while the glue cures
once these get opened up the excess glue gets scraped away at this station here
then the usb port and the vibration motor go in after which
wait hold on a minute
two more glue scraping stations okay so oneplus is currently at a stage
of production called pvt that actually means that every single
phone you see here today is going to end up recycled at some point
and they will produce anywhere from hundreds to even thousands of phones
during pvt in an effort to get things streamlined before they go to mass
production and so as part of this process they found out that there was a
15 chance that glue would seep out again
at this stage right here so in the future they might be able to
eliminate these stations this whole thing is a constantly evolving process
from here the assembled displays and chassis get
run through a series of test patterns to ensure some basic functionality so under
this station we find yet again more trays full of rejected parts with
flaws both big and very very small
finally some protective covers get applied and
the whole thing gets carted off to storage
uh can i have one thank you
here we're getting our first look at the rear panel as the rear camera covers and
the fingerprint sensor get placed now the fingerprint sensor is going to be
exposed to the user so it gets precisely
aligned by machine before being pressed
into place now this next station here is another
great example of the growing panes that you go through with a new device
you see this little sticker pad here they had to add this to the rear cover
because a taller portion of the pcb rubs here now they can probably revise
this sort of thing in the future so this sticker might not be necessary forever
but for now some extra protection seemed prudent the back cover is now ready and
it's actually going to jump across the line where we'll pick up with it later
on batteries get checked here and then they too get passed across the u-shaped
production line leading us to the beating heart and the pretty face of
every modern flagship phone the main board excuse me
complete with snapdragon 845 processor
and the rear camera which in this case
is a dual 16 plus 20 megapixel affair
the completed chassis and the display from before those actually join us here
now it's time for some rapid fire component installation it's it's
basically like building a little tiny pc
so we've got ambient sensor placement the front camera then
at a single station right here in goes
the earpiece speaker the headphone jack
and a daughter board then after that we've got
wait really
four people it takes four people to install and
cable manage two dinky little rf cables
well actually yes it does because of the importance of this step
these connectors in here are very fragile and the placement and management
of these wires is imperative to the functionality of the phone
after the ribbon cables go in for the daughter board right behind me this
protective cover right here for it goes in almost entirely automatically now
precise alignment here is critical because even though oneplus doesn't
advertise it the bottom of the phone by
the main loudspeaker here actually has similar waterproofing to other flagship
devices this has apparently been true since the five so
it doesn't mean that oneplus is going to warranty you if the water damage sticker
turns red when you send it in but it is nice to have that little bit
of peace of mind this station here is all about identifying process and supply
chain issues every major component of the phone has a
qr code that gets scanned into their system here and then stored on board the
phone so that oneplus can quickly track failures in the field back to the
component supplier assembly line and
even the qc staff that let it through
then we get a quick power on test to ensure
that base functionality looks okay
followed by the motherboard cover which goes on in a similar fashion to the
daughter board cover remember how i promised batteries would
be joining us from across the aisle here they are so they go into the phone here
followed by another computerized inspection machine
where my main man here is rocking the
world's greatest footwear and this
trippy machine that aligns the back panel with the front and then places it
on
these two pressers here and then this little roller doodad
ensure that the back panel is fully adhered and then the finished phones get
a final visual check to ensure that
everything is bueno this also includes a little
wipe down in most cases so uh
that's it we're done right
so why is this video over well do you guys remember how i promised
that over a hundred people would touch one of these before it left the factory
this is only like 70ish so after software gets loaded every device gets a
special code entered into its numpad to enter testing mode and then goes through
a shockingly thorough qa screening process
so at stage one they test the flash with this little black box here then they
record a video while the phone is sitting in a mechanical shaker to ensure
that its image stabilization is working as expected
stage two has testers snapping a photo for comparison against a reference image
that is stored in the qa software and then stage three
actually lifts up the phone against this little
metal barrier here to ensure that the proximity sensor is working as intended
stage four checks auto focus on both cameras by moving the phone back and
forth from a target while stage five screens for dead pixels on the camera
sensor or dust under the cover at stage
six every phone goes into a little mini rf chamber for gps and wi-fi testing and
then at stage seven antenna operation is
verified but we are far from done
so oneplus actually started pre-installing screen protectors on
their phones to protect against shipping breakage on the oneplus x a few years
ago and this has continued ever since so
this goes on right here then we gotta move over to the other
side of the line this guy's not just chilling and listening to music he's actually making
sure that the headphone jack when it's plugged in or unplugged behaves
correctly and then his partner here is making sure that the RGB indicator led
and stream brightness control are functioning normally
the microphone and speaker are both tested in here to ensure that they need
spec this apparently has the highest failure rate on finished devices at
about one in a thousand and if the speaker is misaligned or really if the
device fails any of these tests it will get sent for disassembly for them to try
again all right almost done here just five more stations
so here both the selfie and the rear camera get checked again this time by a
human for any weirdness that the automated tests might have missed a fun
story oneplus actually ran into some customer complaints people thought that
their phones were refurbished because they had the pictures these guys were
taking in the factory on them uh no it's fine they just forgot to wipe them
no big deal moving right over here the g sensor gets
checked by this trippy little rotating table and nfc functionality is verified
both normal functionality and high speed
dash charging functionality are checked here
and then this machine uses infrared depth sensing to ensure
that the curvature of the back of the phone is to spec
bringing us finally to one more visual inspection and wipe
down before the finished phones are placed in protective sleeves and
prepared to be sent to packaging so each one of these just to give you
guys some idea of the volume here each one of these contains about 50
phones completely ready to go
oh i don't know where i got this from the environmental stress room
presumably that's what that says i have no way of knowing is not as impressive to look at but it's
really important so they've got a number of different chambers in here ones that
are designed to rapidly increase and decrease temperature from 75 all the way
to -40 for up to a week at a time ones
that are designed to deliver very high temperatures at 95 humidity for up to
500 hours at a time and they've got this raindrop test which isn't actually
running right now but we can open it up they would expect a phone
under this shower for a hundred hours to
function normally after a few days of dry out time
dang but it's not as outright impressive as
room number two where they do one meter 1.5 meter and
1.8 meter drop tests
onto a slab of marble with a keyway
technician checking the phone's functionality
after each fall so they do each side of the phone two
times and they accept
10 cracked screens but they expect the
entire rest of the phone's functionality including the camera to remain
unimpacted so to speak by this type of torture i
mean that seems reasonable enough to me i mean most people would have to be like
walking around like this with a phone on their head to drop it from 1.8 meters
all the time and that one isn't even the most
strenuous test in this room this tumbler
right here check this out
oh you hear that this guy drops up to four phones
one meter in any orientation
a total of 150
times now oneplus does expect some
aesthetic damage here but once again more than ten percent
cracked screens means it is back to the
drawing board
oh that's hard to listen to
we saved the best for last this is the
endurance lab so in room one we found
all kinds of treats this guy right here
can press on the usbc and headphone jacks and remove and insert cables 10
000 times after that stress test the phone will be
taken out disassembled and inspected for structural damage that could be
reinforced in future designs this guy right here
is a mechanical butt that puts 25 kilograms of pressure onto
the top of the phone a thousand times this is for careless
people who keep their phone in their back pocket
this one right over here this one's actually kind of depressing
this is the 10 centimeter drop tester it works in conjunction with the edge
tester that's over there to pick up and drop each phone
10 000 times from the back 10 000 times from the front then another
2 000 times on each edge for a total of 28
000 miner drops they expect the phones to survive this
kind of treatment it's actually kind of cathartic to watch
so that's pretty much it a huge thank you to oneplus for sponsoring us out
here to take a look at the behind the scenes production of the oneplus 6 and a
big thank you to you for watching if you guys dislike this video you know where
that button is but if you liked it hit like get subscribed and maybe consider
checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also link down there is our
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which you should totally join
oh i forgot
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