KEY FINDINGS

• The new design is so sleek that there are zero visible screws. We aren’t fazed though—where there’s a seam, there’s a way! The black trim cover around the joysticks unclips with ease, revealing two screws near the tips of the handles. Two more screws are hidden under the L1 and R1 buttons, which come up with a little clip-prying (and potential flying).

• Lift off! Four Phillips screws and some clips are the only things standing between customers and an open DualSense controller. Just like the DualShock 4 and DualShock 3, the DualSense battery has a tough plastic shield and isn’t glued in place. For battery-swapping serviceability, this beats almost any modern smartphone. This grey monolith clocks in at 5.7 Wh—a sizable increase from the DualShock 4’s 3.7 Wh pack. There’s a reason for that extra juice: something has to power all this tech. The new DualSense cell is more in line with the 5 Wh pack in Nintendo’s Switch Pro Controller, which is also easy to replace.

• Next up, out come the guts: button sensors, motherboard, haptic drivers, and adaptive triggers, all mounted to a black midframe. From this perspective, it’s clear how much faith Sony has in the DualSense’s upgrades. Half the internal volume is dedicated to the triggers and haptics! Both adaptive trigger assemblies connect with cables, but the haptic drivers, USB-C port, and joysticks are all held down by soldered connections.

• Let’s dig into this classified alien tech... er, variable resistance

A trigger [ Image A]. The trigger works normally without any of the mechanics active, making contact with a button on the blue ribbon cable. But game developers can choose to program the controller to precisely adjust how difficult the trigger is to pull. The silver motor spins the white worm gear, which drives the black lever arm up and provides resistance to the trigger’s lever action, adding another level of feedback to the controller.

• With all the easily replaceable parts out, we’re down to the soldered-on bits. First off are the two Foster-branded voice coil actuators driving the haptics system. Next: the two joysticks. These look identical to the Alps-brand sticks from the DualShock 4. Compared to these, a Joy-Con joystick replacement is a breeze. PlayStation joysticks are less prone to drift than the notoriously drifty Joy-Cons, but soldering them on is a big miss. Finally, the USB-C port: another high-wear component that we’d prefer to see easily replaced.

• The DualSense controller turned out to be among the PS5’s biggest upgrades. As a final treat, here’s an X-ray look at all the DualSense we just dismantled [ Image B] thanks again to our friends at Creative Electron. We also owe a huge thanks to iFixit contributor Chunglin Chin, who did the detective work needed to ID all those chips in the motherboard steps. Great job!

• Repairability Score: 7 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair).