It took awhile for Microsoft's engineers to build the Zune HD, but it only took Rapid Repair around a day to rip the touch-screen media player apart.

"The Zune HD is easy to open and repair," writes the online repair service, which makes a mini-event out of tearing apart seemingly every high-priced Apple and Microsoft gizmo that appears on the market. "It looks and acts like an iPod Touch on steroids."

Indeed, some of the Zune HD's internal components bear distinct similarities to the iPod: "The battery and headphone jacks [in the Zune HD] share connection types like the Nano and the Touch," the report says. "The Zune HD has many repairable parts which is always good when you drop or break it!"

With that in mind, after removing the screws holding the back panel of the Zune HD in place, along with its ribbon cables and a few other components, the Rapid Repair team gained access to Zune HD's heart. In this image, you're looking at two Toshiba NAND flash memory chips; the small silver chip beneath them is an Atheros AR6002, responsible for mobile Wi-Fi:

This next photo shows the main chip, smack-dab in the center there: an NVIDIA Tegra APX2600-HM-A3 processor with a 600MHz core:

If you've followed along with those directions, and your brand-spanking-new Zune HD has been reduced to a handful of electronic components on your table, just make sure you planned out beforehand how to reassemble the device; Microsoft will likely void your warranty if it finds you've been playing MacGyver with it.

Despite the high-profile rollout of the Zune HD on Sept. 15, though, Microsoft seems more concerned about creating a Zune-branded ecosystem in which the portable device plays an important but not necessarily vital role.

"With today's simultaneous launch of the device and the Zune 4.0 software," Redmond said in a press release, "Microsoft is positioning Zune as an entertainment platform that allows people to watch video or listen to music on their Zune HD, their PC, or their TV and seamlessly transition among them."

By porting media functionality onto other devices via the Zune Marketplace, Microsoft seems to be tacitly acknowledging that its old strategy, centered on Zune as a device, was unlikely to make much of a dent against Apple's iPod line and its estimated 70 percent of the portable-media-device market.

Besides, the ability to download a TV episode from Zune Marketplace onto the Zune HD, view part of it while on the move, and then finish the last 10 minutes at home by plugging the Zune into a dock connecting it to an HD television - that versatility may be something that gives Microsoft more appeal to customers in the space.