The PS5 Pro is here and now that it’s been out for more than a week, there’s an official teardown of the console from iFixit. These teardowns are almost entirely focused on how repairable the hardware is. Unfortunately, iFixit doesn’t do repairability scores for gaming consoles yet. So there’s no official score on how easy it is to repair the PS5 Pro if any of the components need to be replaced.
The good news is that the teardown does still offer up some good information. Stuff that you might want to know if you’ve already bought one. Or if you’re considering picking one up. Even without the repairability score, the teardown does give some other useful insights and it highlights one detail that will make anyone who’s inclined to repair things themselves very happy. The PS5 Pro is no less repairable than the standard PS5 or the PS5 Slim. In fact, it has a leg up in one particular way.
The PS5 Pro teardown reveals that Sony has implemented an easily replaceable CMOS battery
If you’re not familiar with what a CMOS battery is, iFixit explains it quite thoroughly. The basic gist of it is, that a CMOS battery is used to power smaller chip components that handle things like time and date, hardware settings, and more. In devices like consoles, these small “Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor” chips help keep the time and date in sync. If the battery for that chip goes out, your console will likely have trouble connecting to the internet.
As time and date are what consoles use to help website validation, iFixit says. That battery goes out, and you have a problem if you can’t replace it. In the PS5 and PS5 Slim, this battery is under the main board and not very easy to get to without taking the console apart. The PS5 Pro is different. The CMOS battery sits readily available under the main console cover that you can pull off. Under the cover, there’s now a small housing for the battery.
This housing has its own plate cover which can be accessed by removing a single screw. Very similar to the plate cover for the NVMe SSD expansion slot. In short, if the battery ever needs to be replaced, you can get to it without taking everything apart. That’s a huge win for consumers.
Entry into the console is still toolless and fans are easily accessible
There are a couple of other good notes worth mentioning. Getting into the console still requires no tools whatsoever. You can pull the console covers off with nothing but your hands just like the other two PS5 versions. The fans are also easy to get to and pull out. You should be doing this routinely every so often to clean them. But it’s also important if you ever need to replace the fans for any reason.
Repairing the rest of the console still requires some know-how or at least a very in-depth step-by-step guide. Kind of like the ones you would find on iFixit. And of course, a bit of patience as these things take time to do properly.
