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Schools Won't Like How Difficult the New iPad Is To Repair (ifixit.com)
Last week, Apple introduced a refreshed 9.7-inch iPad with Apple Pencil support. iFixit has published its teardown of the device this morning, and as The Verge points out, schools won't like how difficult it is to repair. From the report: The takeaway from all this is that the new iPad isn't going to be any easier to repair than prior generations, which were already borderline unrepairable. If an iPad breaks, there's almost no chance that a district will be able to repair it in-house; whereas on cheaper Chromebooks, there's a possibility an IT team could open them up to make some basic fixes. It's a weak point that it's hard to see Apple ever addressing. And since schools aren't exactly forgiving environments for a lent-out device, how well the iPad holds up to drops and dings, and how expensive it is to fix, are bound to be factors in a school's decision on which devices to adopt. Mac Rumors highlights the key findings from iFixit's teardown: The new iPad's lack of waterproofing, non-replaceable charging port, zero upgradeability, and use of glue throughout the internals added up to a "repair nightmare." iFixit then pointed towards the HP Elite x2 1012 G1 tablet, which got a perfect repairability score of 10 out of 10, summarizing that "Apple's 'education' iPad is still a case of won't -- not can't." One of the iPad's advantages in terms of repairability comes in the form of its digitizer panel easily separating from the display. iFixit pointed out that in the event that either component should break, repair will be easier for schools and educators. The sixth-gen iPad has the same battery as the previous model, with 32.9 Wh capacity. iFixit noted that while this allows Apple to reuse existing manufacturing lines to reduce waste, the battery is still locked behind a "repair-impeding adhesive" that greatly reduced the iPad's repairability score. Apple has provided easy battery removal before, in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, but iFixit hasn't seen anything like it since. Ultimately, iFixit gave the 2018 iPad a repairability score of 2 out of 10, favoring the fairly easy repair options of its air-gapped, non-fused display and digitizer glass, but taking marks off for its heavy use of adhesive and sticky tape.
The teardowns are great, but the self-serving self-righteousness about repairability is such obvious bullshit.
Schools do not repair tablets. They buy them with service contracts and ship dead ones back.
Yes, iFixit wants to sell more repair toolkits. We get it. They should build their own devices, then, and let the market decide. I mean, how is that HP Elite x2 1001 G1-21 / S001 v2 selling? If repairability is so important, customers must be buying it in droves, right?
The real question is not how difficult it is to repair but does it need repairing. If you're used to things that break down a lot then you think along the lines of repairing. But if something is built right it doesn't break much so repairability is a minor issue. Things should be built right and real world tough.
Duh! Throwitaway! Getanudder!
There's really no scenario in which an iPad is superior to a Chromebook for teaching students.
Yes, kids may clamor for iPads.. but they'd be clamoring for a lot of useless / fun things if they had the option.
You dont have children, do you.
Now consider a whole school DISTRICT full of them, with devices they dont own, and probably dont particularly like (because, school...)
Any device aimed at schools and NOT specifically designed to be both repairable and robust as hell is a conceptual failure.
This is in fact at least half the reason chromebooks are so successful in schools.. There are a wide range of chromebooks designed
to 'take the knocks' (and of course plenty that are crap, but those dont tend to last in market).
And these Ipads are NOT designed to not be broken by children. Not even close.
I would repair it if parts were readily available at a suitable price.
Slashdot's newest owner will turn this wreck around.
Redundant news - could have easily said "new iPad no harder to repair than previous models."
If you're paying the premium for Apple devices, you're willing to suffer all the extra costs that come with it. I expect the Acer Chromebook Tab 10 to clean up most remaining iPad EDU sales because it's $329 WITH a stylus. It's not Apple Pencil quality, but it's good enough.
They don't get thrown away idiot, they ship it back to a "factory" repair shop. It either gets a quick refurbishment or parted out to refurb other units. Then put back into the replacement cycle and given to the next kid who breaks one.
"Easy to repair" units would end up getting torn up by the kids, and things like batteries and SSD would start showing up on eBay in large numbers.
Why does the journalist think school staff spend time fixing computing devices, especially the smaller devices? This has always been outsourced. If no business offers a repair/warranty service, a school will not buy the product.
Here's an idea: instead of siphoning off education funds buying consumer bling, how about we pay teachers so the people who are responsible for educating your kids don't have to get food stamps to survive?
Today, I heard an Oklahoma teacher lamenting the fact that her school bought tablets for the kids, but couldn't afford wi-fi, so basically, the tablets were completely worthless. Meanwhile, public schools are being starved for funds which end up going to charter schools run by political cronies which actually such even more than the public schools.
You are welcome on my lawn.
HP Elite X2 1012
I have had a second generation iPad since 2012, and it has worked well for five years. In fact, it still works very well, because I gave mine to my brother at the end of last year when I bought a new iPad Pro. I just needed more memory, and wanted to use the Apple Pencil when lecturing, which is not supported on the older iPads. Having had two of them already, the iPad is very well made and I have not had the need to repair it. It would be nice if the battery was easily replaceable, but even after five years of use, the battery in my old iPad works reasonably well, and if you're watching a movie close to an outlet, not an issue. Since I use my iPad Pro for lecturing, I would like to see the capability to record while connected to a projector. iOS has screen recording capability built into the OS, but it does not work while connected to a projector.
Im pretty sick of hearing about apple.
How should we look at this problem? Do we look at it as:
We have now reached the era where students, when appropriate for their age and learning needs, now have access to equipment that's:
- more computationally capable than they ever had before,
- squeezed into a package smaller and longer lasting than ever before,
- available at a price undreamt of years ago,
- able to be connected to more resources than ever before?
Or is it just, "why is this thing so hard to fix?"
Now, whether they're appropriate for kids at a certain age of school is for a separate discussion.
The sixth-gen iPad has the same battery as the previous model, with 32.9 Wh capacity. iFixit noted that while this allows Apple to reuse existing manufacturing lines to reduce waste, the battery is still locked behind a "repair-impeding adhesive" that greatly reduced the iPad's repairability score.
(emphasis mine)
So the single consumable part in these devices, the battery, might come from an older device but still can't be replaced.
And this is how they're reducing waste? Colour me unimpressed.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Liked their 1000$ devices assembled with hot glue and sticky tape! tsk, tsk....
Why should they care one bit how hard it will be for Apple to repair them once they send them back? I certainly don't.
That's not their problem, it's Apples.
Easy to repair units would be repaired locally, creating a semi-skilled job locally. That sucking sound as the school's budget gets transferred to Apple's money bin in Ireland annoys the local taxpayers.
even the for profit charter schools are having a hard time getting funding. Americans are actively hostile to education.
The tablets are popular because they're a one time expense. Better pay is a permanent increase and that means raising taxes. Until you can get people to vote for tax raises it ain't happening except in a few limited cases where the teachers can move to another state. That's what happened with the last strike. One of the nearby states was trying to poach the teachers. There's a bit of a shortage right now because the ones that became teachers to dodge the draft in the 60s/70s are retiring & dying and teacher pay is so bad nobody can afford to be one.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's not supposed to be repairable!!! At this price-point and form factor no-one really wants to go there. You are buying a small and portable computer (it is a computer) that is marketable to schools as being better than a bag of books. It is in someways, but vendor lockin is a big problem. But, that is another question. Variations in learning are welcome but it seems like there are certain prescribed ways to do things that cannot change easily. On the positive, the new iPad is well made and will get bashed and bruised and will last a students curriculum. But..... Apple is a premium product and chromebooks are not. Apple can't quite get to the realisation that $300 is still too expensive for school education. $300 is a significant outlay per pupil. And that is without pencil/keyboard. Chromebooks are cheaper and more 'cloudy' which reduces cost in managing almost everything (at a loss pf privacy etc...). Apple doesn't want to be left out of education but it really seems they can never break their business model of making premium hardware at dell prices. Apple can't win education but I'm glad they are trying.
I'm the lead tech at a K-8 public school district in Illinois and can confirm that none of the districts that I collaborate with care about the iPad's repairability. We all do the same thing... We get our ACiT and ship the things off to be replaced by Apple under Apple Care. I personally replace 10-15 of these every week from our fleet of 3,000+ iPads. At our district specifically, the cost of repair is passed on to the student and their parents. We don't care how easy it is to repair. Only that it can be quickly put back into stock to be made available for a student that needs one.
Thank you for enlightening us with your contemporary, relevant anecdote.
Thank you for the nudge. It's about time to uncomment the localhost slashdot mapping in my hosts file. It's as if I'm drawn to this place like an abusive spouse.
I can guarantee you the thing still holds true, it is more expensive to do a swap out than repair, especially if repair can be done on-site by techs instead of needing to go to a repair depot.
Cuz guess what? I still do repairs to this day, on top of dozens of other things I do.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Spending per public school pupil has roughly tripled in the last 45 years (inflation-adjusted). The U.S. now spends more per student than any other OECD nation except Switzerland.
The problem is school administration. The number of non-teaching administrative staff has more than doubled in 45 years, far outpacing growth in number of teachers or students. They control how funds for education are spent. Basically every time we increase spending on education, the administrators use it raise their own pay, hire more administrators, and buy useless but high-profile bling like iPads. Every time we cut spending on education, the administrators make sure it goes straight to the teachers. The teachers then get lots of media coverage complaining about how they're underpaid and under-supplied. Which leads to further increases in education spending which the administrators sop up again, passing only a token amount down to the teachers.
If you've got a proposal for how to selectively reduce spending on only administrative staff in public schools, I'd love to hear it. If not, the only alternative we have that we know works is competition. Which means charter schools, even with all their warts.
This post is pure conjecture. Schools do not have technical staff sitting around repairing sensitive electronics like iPads -- they send them away for warranty replacement or repair, just like a homeowner would do.
Not only does this iPad have EXACTLY the same ARBITRARY "Repairability Score" as many, many of the reasonably-priced alternatives to this iPad (which their "comparison example" is, at THREE TIMES the price, is most assuredly NOT!); but their ARBITRARY "Repairability Score" completely overlooks some extremely important points; which, if iFixit wan't being totally ARBITRARY in their scoring, by not taking the simple step if factoring-in what is MOST LIKELY to break in a particular product.
1. Hardly anything ever goes wrong with iPads but the glass. And after many years, the battery.
2. IPad batteries are very robust. By the time the average iPad is seeing battery wear out, the iPad is so old it is ready for recycling, anyway. Seriously. My iPad 2 gets used every day for at least 8 hours, and gets charged a full-cycle, or nearly so, every single day since I got it in later 2012, and the battery health still reports 88%, and if there has been any diminished run-time, It hasn't been much. So the Repairability of the battery in an iPad simply isn't a factor in real life. Plus, they likely use adhesive strips that release when pulled; so that hardly is a hinderance to battery replacement! But yet iFixit ALWAYS lumps that in with ANY dot of staking-compound, hot melt glue (which every single tablet and almost all modern laptops use extensively).
3. Even iFixit pointed out that the glass is not bonded to the display in this model, making the glass repair drop dead simple and cheap. And yet, they literally do not give them repairability "points" for making THE single most likely repair item as simple and inexpensive to repair as practical, and more repairable than many other tablets, laptops and Chromebooks.
As a former repair tech myself, I DO agree that the Lightning connector soldered to the main board, rather than on a separate "Jack board", MAY be a slightly questionable design decision, I feel that, if Apple had been seeing significant percentages of iOS devices being returned with broken/worn-out Lightning connectors, Apple would have put that Jack on a daughter board by now.
But, this entire "repairability" argument for this product, in this application, is nothing but a red herring in real-world Impact to a school district. And with Apple's "iPad Sharing", which allows a school staffer/teacher/student to simply trade their broken iPad for another "off the cart", and have it be cloned into being the same setup and data as their broken one, means that "repairability" is also a non-issue for the student-users and their teachers.
Will care about repairability of the new iPad exactly as much as they did before. As in, ânot giving a flying fuckâ. This idea that the western world is supposedly filled with large organizations that repair their hardware is quite hilarious. In the real world and especially in large organizations NOBODY does that.
You mean after all those times I've asked if, when buying a Mac, you have to throw it out after three years or when something breaks because all the parts are welded together and I got downmodded, that I've been telling the truth?
I'm shocked!
I think that would be "We're too lazy and stupid"
too lazy for the second 'o'
too stupid to notice it missing
Are they suggesting IPads were repairable to start with?
Shouldn't they be, you know, going for a cheaper and more practical option? I figure budget must be a concern seeing as about 45% of you don't believe in evolution (e.g. your schools can't be up to much)?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Schools don't fix iOS devices, they buy AppleCare and have Apple fix them. After 3 years they start ditching devices when they break, replacing them with new devices that also come with 3 year warranties.
Buying half-price Apple devices (compared with windows 10 tablet from HP) allows schools to have a device that costs as much as the HP tablet, has a 6 year lifespan, and is bought in two separate payments 3 years apart.
The math:
Buy 1st iPad w/ AppleCare $350
Three years later, buy 2nd iPad w/ AppleCare $350
Total cost, $700
Total usable life, 6 years
Compare those numbers to buying the $600 HP Windows 10 devices.
Ken
The limitations of the technology are frustrating. It is hard to imagine how ipads are useful in a classroom environment, other than as a tool to buy and consume content, even if "educational materials".
Chromebooks are far more useful, but horrifying from a privacy standpoint.
Does anyone know what Apple and Google do with the EULA? Are parents sent EULAs to agree to on behalf of their children? Do they waive them because they're minors and have no legal choice but to sign?
Are there any decent tablets that ARE easy to repair? Tablets as a whole aren't generally an easy to repair item. This isn't just the iPad. Can a Chromebook be easily repaired?
That is the silliest thing I've heard. You really think your average middle school or elementary school is going to bother repairing these? They are black box devices. They have an extremely low failure rate with a same day replacement for any town that has a Bestbuy or Apple Store and 2-3day for Amazon, or other 3rd party.
And they are cheap as hell... $300 for current gen iPads. If you have a media lab, you are only going to get 2-3 years out of them anyway before they start rotating in new devices. This isn't the old days where you had your macbooks for 5 years. ( or my old days where there were only a dozen Apple II's and you had to pair up with a friend )
In college when I was a student worker for a computer lab, we had a mac lab with about 30 units, that we had say a dozen minor repairs and PM and approximately one major failure per year. Those boxes were approximately $3K a piece all said and done. ( and that's in 1990's money ). That lab lasted about 3 years before we upgraded approximately 1/4 of them each year after.... so any given year you were laying out about $22.5K.
That is 75 iPads per year.
Repair? Really?
Sorry for the yelling. $309 is the price for the K-12 educational discount on the current gen iPad with 32GB of storage.
That's literally half the price of the ipad from just 5 years ago. ( double the storage, cpu blah blah blah )
I'm not sure repair is even a needed thing for that cheap.
iPad 4 was in 2012,
Now 6 years for 2 generations ?
ICT use, as currently practised in primary and secondary education, shows no evidence of academic benefit to students or teachers, while also showing an inverse correlation with decreased academic performance (OECD, 2015). iPads/tablets, laptops, smartphones, etc., in schools are more of a problem than a benefit. Why are taxpayers giving all this money and wasting all their children's and young adults' time with this nonsense?
Yes, there is a specific argument for school pupils to learn to use office software and to search databases for post-secondary studying and work. That's not the same thing as current ICT practices in schools.
Reference: OECD (2015) Students, Computers and Learning: Making The Connection, Paris, OECD Publishing [Online]. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789... (Accessed 15 September 2015).
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
... that's a feature.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"