Pixel 5a teardown shows a surprising amount of metal

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  After prying off the screen and a graphite cover over the battery, the main guts of the Pixel 5a look like this. [credit:
  PBKreviews
  ]

iFixit seems to have given up on full teardowns for the Pixel line, but we still have YouTubers! PBKreviews has ripped apart the Pixel 5a on camera, exposing the water-resistant innards for all to see.

The Pixel 5a’s construction is not all that different from the Pixel 5. The screen is again held on with Google’s unique combination of glue and rectangular clips. While that combo seems like it would result in better screen adhesion than most smartphones, the methodology actually didn’t fare well on the Pixel 5, as users complained about uneven panel gaps. The Pixel 5a display tabs are now a lot bigger, and there are more of them, so hopefully, that will prevent similar alignment problems.

For a phone with a plastic exterior, there’s a surprising amount of metal in the Pixel 5a. One of the first things you’ll see after prying off the screen is a metal cover over the motherboard. Like the Pixel 5a, the whole back of the phone is metal, but that metal is hidden in a plastic coating Google calls a “bio-resin.”