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They take smaller blood draws from finger tip pricks that aren't large enough in volume to run on a standard machine from Siemens et al.

To get around this, they supposedly dilute the samples to a point where the concentrations of analytes are well below the machines minimum operating specifications.

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Theranos responded that they use the exact manufacturer dilution protocol on their volumes. I don't know of any fact-based article saying they were operating the machines below their minimum specs.

My understanding is that only the Edison machine uses finger prick amounts. However, it sounds like since these machines don't work they are using standard instruments. For these they take venous blood draws, just using a child-sized vacuum tube instead of an adult-sized vacuum tube. She talked about using the child-sized vacuum tubes in an interview. Not really a big differentiator in my opinion.

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