Planning on forking out for the new iPad? Better take darn good care of it Teardown show-offs iFixit have found few changes with the latest iPad – but it does have a larger battery than the more expensive "Pro" iPad. The sixth-gen iPad is aimed at the education market and is the first non-Pro model to support the Apple Pencil. This means there's a budget digitiser incorporated in the display. iFixit …
What a stupid commenter. I’ve actually owned IPads from the very first edition.
IPads are very very durable. I’ve exposed them to everything imaginable, and they’ve held up very well.
I’ve also owned android phones and a tablet. The tablet I sent back in the 1st week with a cracked screen... what a cheap piece on crap.
Maybe people should ask the actual owners of the devices (which overwhelmingly love them) than a company that gets paid to nitpick the stupidest things.
Add a child with fingers covered in peanut butter, jam, snot, grease, ear wax, fingerpaint, chalk dust, glitter glue, random "classroom pet" fur/poop/food, and you can kiss that touch screen goodbye.
Add in the inevitable kid that "accidentally" uses a permanent marker, ink pen, crayon, or coloured pencil, whoops there goes another screen.
Oh look! A hole! Let's see what fits in there! Now your charging/data port is full of fluff, lint, crumbs, peanut butter, ear wax, snot, fur, poop, pencil shavings, glitter glue, the random entrails of an animal you can't identify, or other substances which a forensics team would be hard pressed to determine.
Children are already the main source of destruction in the universe, bored shitless, inquisitive as hell, armed with any number of items, angry at their teacher/other students school children only make that exponentially worse.
Obviously BooHoo4U has never had a child stick a PB&J sandwich into the VCR, a pita bread into the CD/DVD tray, a Tootsieroll into a USB port, or take apart the alarm clock to find out what makes it tick... because if they had such experiences, letting a school child loose with a ~$400 bit of electronics would be the *last* item on the list of things to do by sane people.
But the rest of us are obviously mistaken. Apple devices are so rugged as to shrug off anything such a child might try, & are so inexpensive as to stand up to being used as weaponry in a cafeteria food fight.
I'm so glad BooHoo4U could set the record straight! /Sarcasm.
Yes, the downvote was presumably because I forgot to mention the main source of entropy increase in the Universe, which is children.
I have nothing against salesmen - they do an important job and without them it's hard to make a company function - but some of the things I have seen them do with portable computing devices would not be kind to an iPad. The most extreme case being the guy who was trying to do a software demo in the course of which he removed various bits of gear from his bag - in the days of Zip drives, removable hard drives and the like - and then proceeded to throw them back into the bag again on top of a laptop.
"Add a child with fingers covered in peanut butter, jam, snot, grease, ear wax, fingerpaint, chalk dust, glitter glue, random "classroom pet" fur/poop/food, and you can kiss that touch screen goodbye.
Add in the inevitable kid that "accidentally" uses a permanent marker, ink pen, crayon, or coloured pencil, whoops there goes another screen."
Dude - Screens are much hardier than you seem to give them credit for - literally nothing that you described above would take more than a wet wipe to sort out.
Also screen protectors are a thing.
"Raise your hand if you’d give a kid an electronic device costing hundreds of dollars, without purchasing a child proof case for it?"
I'd raise my hand.. because before buying things for my kids I look at how easy they are to repair.
So they both have iPhones because I know that I can get a new screen for < £30 and can normally swap them in around 5-10 minutes depending on how badly broken they are. They also both have older generation iPad minis because despite being glued the screens on those are quite easy to swap too... based on this article I probably wouldn't buy them a newer iPad..
You seem to have some aversion to being well informed about your purchases.
You want to take a device that's priced at "only" ~$200 for educational use, costs another ~$75 if you want to add that vaunted pencil, and then slap on another ~$100 for a child resistant case? That's a pretty expensive bit of kit you want to foist upon a school that may already be strapped for cash.
I don't know about you but the school where my son teaches could better put that kind of money into other frivolous things like actual pencils, paper, lesson books, or providing a nutricious breakfast for the children.
So which do you choose: a fancy Apple device that others have shown to be a maintenence nightmare that will require even more money to keep working, or to give them the base tools with which the students can Get Shit Done?
"iFixit can you give me repair grade on my HDD hard drive? What about my LCD monitor?"
Well the thing to remember here is that you can expect a mobile device with a glass front to sustain more damage than a hard drive or a fixed LCD Monitor (Though interestingly some LCD monitors are quite easy to take apart and swap out faulty components if you know what youre looking at)
The point of the iFixit article is to give you an idea of what to expect if/when you break your device - some people wont care - thats fine, this article isnt for them. Others however will care - for example because I work in IT so "Must know" these things, end up doing at least one screen swap a month for friends/family - its good to know what to expect in advance.
Raises hand as someone who manages 500 iPads for children which all have "child-proof" cases on them.
We also have a budget code for "kid broke it, our preferred repairer had to change the screen again and/or it's the third time for a new screen so it's now basically irreparable (buttons, casing, etc.) and the parents have to pay for that". An actual budget code.
In an environment where they're not ALLOWED to take the devices home. They are FORCED to put them away neatly at the end of the day, and on charge, and in a secure lockbox, overseen by an adult. They aren't ALLOWED to use them outside of lesson, unsupervised, or throw them around in the playground.
I'd estimate 2-3 a week, if not more.
Similar number of Chromebooks? 4 screen repairs in two years, all £25 module-swap replacements from Amazon. Work fine. And Chromebook are huge things with hinges and stuff.
Half the number of Android tablets? Er. Dunno. Yet to repair one.
Honestly, Apple stuff is as fragile as crystalline shite.
I can guarantee if someone sold unrepairable cars then there would be a revolt.
French cars continue to sell, despite such gems as having to remove a bumper to replace a headlight bulb (and my VW group vehicle has some leanings in that direction with front indicators using filament bulbs permanently sealed in the reflector unit.
Did you just compare a car to a miniaturized electronic device?
I’ve seen tablets that have been repaired. The kits to repair them are garbage. The glass replacements are easily scratched and crack. They are no where close to OEM quality.
My nephew got a iPad glass replacement by a “professional” repair company.. the glass shifts around (because they didn’t use enough glue) and the audio port no longer works. You get what you pay for. With Apple you get your device back in mint condition.
I took one iPad that was nearing the end of its warranty into an Apple Store, it had a tiny scratch in the coating on the glass. They gave me a brand new one to replace it. No not a referb, but new (you can tell by the model).
People bitch about things they know nothing about...
You think Apple hasn’t done the math on the appropriate amount of glue to hold things properly together?
My nephew got a iPad glass replacement by a “professional” repair company.. the glass shifts around (because they didn’t use enough glue) and the audio port no longer works. You get what you pay for. With Apple you get your device back in mint condition.
Because often the repair involves putting the motherboard in a completely new outer shell which is extremely difficult to get hold of unless you're Apple and has to be glued together. Hence it is not repairable.
"My nephew got a iPad glass replacement by a “professional” repair company.. the glass shifts around (because they didn’t use enough glue) and the audio port no longer works. You get what you pay for. With Apple you get your device back in mint condition"
That kind of illustrates the point that you are arguing against - if they were easier to repair it would be easier to do a better job of it!
With regards to "you get what you pay for" - yes, you get pretty much the same quality parts without the apple stamp on them for about half the price. As an example Apple battery replacement in my wifes iPhone 6.. £75 cost for me to do it £25. Bought from a reputable supplier that I have been using for years - I have every confidence that this battery will last as long as the apple supplied one.. and if it doesnt I can still buy another two and not be out of pocket!
Wow, I bought an original, new 3000mAh battery for my phone for £9 and fitted it in 30s.
And I carry the old one as an instant re-charge for tough travel days since it takes up almost no space.
I guess everyone has a different view of good value - especially as I just bought an entire, working, high spec phone (used, I should add) for the price of an iPhone battery change (the expensive one - £75).
More Apps are just not worth that much more money, especially when you add in the limitations of iOS.
> I can guarantee if someone sold unrepairable cars then there would be a revolt. This is no different.
You do realise that to build a car from its parts catalogue would cost many times its list price? The cost of replacement car parts - often hidden from us directly because of insurance companies - subsidises the cost of new cars. It's been that way for decades.
This revolt of which you speak - I've seen no sign of it in response to easily damaged and expensive colour-matched bumpers fitted to almost all new cars.
I was under the impression that a repairability score was solely about the extent to which a thing can be repaired. An iPad should score a low number on that basis alone. Is there a need to start making value judgements about the company?
If there were an actual immutable physical reason why Apple had no choice but to sell a device that couldn't be repaired at all, would it get a high repairability score because it was a case of can't not won't?
I'm all for admitting that the iPad is not much of a repairable device, and that Apple's prioritisation partly explains that, but it's somewhat editorialising to suggest you deducted points from a repairability assessment because of the latter.
I still don't see the logic. If it were not possible to build a repairable tablet, I'd want my tablet to get a zero repairability score since it cannot be repaired.
I don't really want my repairability scores to have an editorial stance, I just want to be able to make a value-for-money assessment.
The low score is due to the limited amount of things you can repair and the difficulty involved in repairing them is high. Apple chose to design it that way. Not too difficult to understand I would have thought.
I still don't see the logic.
Here's an example: it's not practical to make a phone/tablet battery pack where you can replace a faulty individual cell, so they don't mark down devices where you have to replace the complete battery pack. If, however, they inspected a TV remote control (say) where the genius manufacturer had decided to solder together the AAA cells then they would mark it down, because that would be an unnecessary dumb-ass choice by the manufacturer.
"I would imagine it's more a case that if it were not possible to build a repairable tablet, then they would score higher. Since it IS possible, Apple get a lower grade."
It certainly is possible because apple did it with some of the other iPads.
"2. It's not libel as their low repairability is a statement of fact."
Principle of English law: "The greater the truth, the greater the libel." There are various defences to libel such as public interest, and this I think falls into this category.
But you also need to prove the libel has caused damage of some kind (financial, reputational), and all the evidence is that, like Ms. Daniels' short-term boyfriend, Apple seems incapable of suffering reputational or financial damage from adverse reporting.
I'm pretty sure and stop me if I'm wrong but the "biting the hand that feeds IT" in the header kind of tells you what the register is about. Do you believe they are picking on anyone in particular? Do Apple deserve special treatment? Can you highlight a series of articles giving praise to one particular company? (devops and agile are not companies)
I do enjoy when people post comments such as yours, could you explain why and what is actually or factually wrong with the article? I await your response with the anticipation of a seven year old getting a lego train set.
They seem to be able to build the iPhone with pretty respectable repairability scores (7s for years, dropping to 6 for the 8/X presumably because of the glass back) yet they don't seem to put much thought into making the iPad easier to repair.
While I'm sure tablets are damaged much less often than phones because few are carried with someone everywhere like a phone is, they are also kept in service a lot longer than the average phone.
I think I should keep this post ready in a template for 'copy and paste' every time an article comes up on this topic with iPads and schools.
"Frasier Speirs, is a teacher at a school in Scotland where he "designed and deployed the world's first whole-school 1:1 iPad deployment in 2010" - and has been running the program ever since. Their breakage rate is between 1-4% since the outset: I'd argue it's hard to get much better than that considering human nature, etc.
(he discusses it in the final third of this podcast following the recent Apple Education event: https://www.relay.fm/canvas/57)"
Sure, the repairability of iPads isn't great, but the amount of times they need to be repaired is also very low.....
> "French cars continue to sell, despite such gems as having to remove a bumper to replace a headlight bulb"
Friend recently bought some fancy headlamps and complaining about having to do exactly this to his Astra van.
Though I suspect you have to drop the engine out of a Renault to release the bumper.
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