Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) new iPad Air looks great, weighs next to nothing, and is nearly impossible to repair, according to iFixit. The industry group gave the iPad Air a repairability score of 2, based on difficult battery removal, lots of adhesive holding everything in place, and fragile internal parts.
It takes some brute force and special iFixit equipment just to open the iPad, but once inside the team found the new 3.73 V, 32.9 WHr, two-cell power unit to be “the worst battery ever,” according to iFixit’s Walter Galan. Trapped under the logic board and glued onto the bottom, the battery eventually comes free, warping in the process.
“Sometimes we sound like a broken record when it comes to terrible repairability, and we get it — seems like there’s a lot of product bashing going on lately,” iFixit Chief Information Architect Miroslav Djuric wrote in the teardown release. “Yet for every fixable Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, there’s a Surface Pro — or, in this case, an iPad Air — to saturate the market with unrepairable devices.”
It turns out the iPad doesn’t fall far from the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) tree. When iFixit reviewed the previous iPad a year ago, it received the same 2 out of 10 score as the Air and the iPad min, just a step up from the site’s lowest ever score, a 1 out of 10, issued to last year’s MacBook Pro.
Cupertino’s newest tablet, the iPad Air, hits stores today, starting at $499 (16GB Wi-Fi) and $629 (cellular) in 42 countries, including the U.S., U.K., and Canada.
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