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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.
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.
Redundant news - could have easily said "new iPad no harder to repair than previous models."
But that wouldn't be clickbaity enough.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
Thank you for this. I sit on a Board of Education for a 5,000+ student district and talk to many other districts. NOBODY is repairing their own tablets. most can't even be bothered to reload toner.
There's a service contract for everything and there isn't enough money in the budget to hire someone to work on this. Most districts I know struggle to keep their networks up and have technicians running at breakneck speed just to fix wireless connections and printer drivers. Repairability may be something a single home user with a tech background cares about, but it's not something that large institutions do.
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.
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.
Windows 10 is a full blown retard convention, not an OS.
That HP tablet is a full blown Windows 10 device that can run any program Windows 10 can, albeit a bit slower. The iPad runs a mobile OS that is nowhere near as capable as OSX and can't even begin to load full blown desktop progrmas.
Right, but the iOS pad does not runWindows 10, which is great selling feature all by itself.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
So? With a bluetooth keyboard you can write papers or do research just as well on an iPad as that HP tablet. And if you absolutely positively ermagerd need to use Windows programs for a class - just install Microsoft Remote Desktop and connect to a terminal server to run Autocad (or whatever). Something you could afford with the cost savings over the HP Way.
Perhaps fewer service contracts and a couple more good techs on staff?
I'll avoid most of the careless flamebait in that message since you know nothing about me, my history, or the district, children and tax payers I volunteer my time for and instead merely point to one of the most public instances of a school district deploying iPads (LA) and the fact that even they didn't repair them, they had it in the contract that Apple would: http://laschoolreport.com/ipad...
Are there large districts that can support hiring a staff of IT people competent enough to repair and support a $200-$400 device? I'm sure there probably are. Is that the norm? You're right, I don't have a large sample size to draw from, but my gut tells me that it's not cost-effective for anything but the very largest institutions who probably have the pricing power to negotiate support when they purchase them anyway.
I'd argue that contrary to your inflammatory comment, it's most responsible for us "idiots" to look at the cost analysis of failure rate x cost to repair + training vs. service contract and choose the lowest cost option. In my district's case, we look at each situation and decide on the most appropriate tool for the job and ensure that our stuff has the proper training to use said devices. That meant a slow rollout of Chromebooks to select classrooms with qualified staff who tested and implemented curriculum supported by those devices, and then they trained their peers and the rollout continued. For the youngest students, iPads made the most sense as they are more comfortable with the touch interface, but I suspect most future devices in the district will be Chromebooks (but that decision also has nothing to do with repairability). By the way, the keyboards on those (Lenovo) devices are the highest point of failure and, yes, we can fix that ourselves.