Break, no fix: Apple and Samsung make repairs hard

Samsung and Apple phones are more difficult to repair than those from other makers, according to a report ranking devices by how easy to fix they are. The two premium smartphone brands came out at the bottom of the table when scored by the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund, a nonprofit consumer advocacy …

[PCScreenOnly]

Keyboard swap = 96 screws

Teach me to get a T14s and not a T14

Now found the former is 96 screws according to the vids, whereas the T14 is 4 from memory

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Keyboard swap = 96 screws

96 screws! That sounds wonderfully painful and not what I'd expect given the reputation T series Thinkpads appear to have.

Some of the HP business-grade laptops aren't too bad service wise (my experience is mostly Elitebooks). All you normally need is a T8 and a Phillips head to get them completely apart, and those that don't have hatches on the base at least have captive screws in the bottom cover instead. The newer they get the worse they are to disassemble, though...and figuring out how the keyboard clips into the top cover is always a pain.

Lenovo's gaming laptops are also generally serviceable once you've removed the fifteen or so screws that hold the bottom cover on (and in the case of a newer LOQ, yank off a bit of rear trim around the heatsinks that feels like its going to snap the retaining clips). Not had to do a full strip down of one yet but they don't look too frightening.

Two of the worst to repair or service in my experience had to be a cheap and nasty 2010-or-so Acer 15.6" thing that had very fragile screen hinge mountings shared with the motherboard standoffs and a newer PC Specialist Recoil II gaming laptop (IIRC it was a TongFang chassis) that looked nice on the outside but was a horrible mess of fragile ribbon cables, awkwardly placed latched ZIF connectors on the underside of boards and razor sharp metal casework edges on the inside that I still have a few scars from.

Bonus mention for a 2018 MacBook Pro which is so glued and soldered together that you can't appear to get inside it without a risk of breaking the damn thing. Apparently suction cups are best used to remove the incredibly thin bottom cover so it doesn't buckle.

Not that there's anything inside that Apple have designed to be replaced.

[DS999]

Re: Keyboard swap = 96 screws

Damn I read about the Macbook Neo having 41 screws for its keyboard and I thought that sounded like overkill. Didn't expect that was less than half as many screws as some competitors!

I get that you want the keyboard to not having any wiggle/flex/etc but once you get beyond a couple dozen screws do more really help the cause?

[Touwer]

Re: Keyboard swap = 96 screws

Well, they are for-profit companies, so if they can save, they will

[cd]

No mention of Framework lappies.

Interdependent javascripts required to even read the PIRG site. Who's being educated here, and about what? Google, about the reader's privacy?

Business as usual in teapot-land.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

I'm surprised Samsungs are so hard to repair. I'd broken the screen on my last Samsung; it was unresponsive to touch and the display was greebled. When I found out it would only cost $100 more to replace the whole phone, I opted to do that and have another full year of warranty, not to mention a phone with another year's lifespan. (The old phone wasn't even a year old, but I neglected to buy a folio case as soon as I got the phone, and by the time I tried, they were no longer available for that years models on Amazon.)

So they're expensive to repair, but as part of the deal for buying the new phone, the shop temporarily installed a screen on the old one so my security keys could be retrieved and the rest of my data copied. Note that: it was worth their while to repair the phone to make a sale.

Margins must be obscenely high in the industry for them to consider that worth pursuing.

[Gene Cash]

Well you ARE spending a whole 'nother $100 on it in addition to the repair cost.

That temporary screen doesn't have to satisfy a warranty, so it's probably some random part that they happened to have. If they didn't happen to have it, they'd have said "sorry, can't get your keys"

If you have the tools and expertise, doing that repair isn't difficult... that's what you're paying for, just like with a plumbing or car repair.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Just

making the battery easily replacable would got a long long long long long way to extending the life of any potential e-waste

My samsung phone... remove screen with plastic knives while using a hot glue gun, disconnect the 2 ribbon cables and the antenna cable, remove main board screws, hot glue gun to remove main board, disconnect battery, more hot glue gun to get the battery physically out of the case... then do the reverse after getting a new battery

[DS999]

iFixit ranks Samsung below Apple

Not sure what criteria these guys were using that shows Apple below Samsung. Maybe they compared with other Samsung models that are a bit more repairable than the Galaxy S?

[AKA_anonymous_coward]

Bootloader

They should also include the ability to unlock the bootloader of the phones to be able to flash the device with an OS such as Lineage that still receives security updates in their criteria .

[Touwer]

Fairphone

No mention of the number one in repairable phones: fairphone

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: Fairphone

Unfortunately, Fairphones are not readily available in the US, and PIRG is a US organization.

[simonlb]

Damn European Socialists

Heaven forbid it actually adopt the EU system, of course – that would be madness.

The US consumers already have forced arbitration as a major consumer right, so why would they need anything as communist as fixable devices or even decent right-to-repair? It's the companies and their profits that need protection from these socialists. These consumers should be glad we allow them to buy our devices and need to shut up and buy the newer one which comes out next week after we EOL their current model and deliberately brick it with a software update!