5 ms·

My quest to fix a broken iPad

48 points by schrofer 13y ago

tluyben2 13y ago
Not sure if this happens everywhere, but in our neighbourhoods (small towns) there are small businesses poppping up all the time who can fix iPhones/iPads (and even Androids, but that's a lot less common) for you and they fix it for, what I would consider, amounts of money which are in fact ridiculous. I had the front, back, home button and battery of an iPhone 4s replaced for E35. I fixed iphones myself before and I wouldn't do it for E80 excluding materials; this guy does it including. And this is not an exception; a lot of jobless women and men are offering this and making E5-E10 per phone or tablet for their time. If you buy your replacement yourself, you only pay that cost, so if you think you can do better than E30 for a replacement package or if you think you want better materials, that works too.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
  E? €?
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    Yes € :)
- userbinator 13y ago
  China? That's what comes to mind. You can get your laptop's motherboard troubleshooted and serviced at the component level, and chipsets reballed and reflowed while you wait, at a fraction of the cost of doing it in the West.
  - kalleboo 13y ago
    Mom and Pop cell phone repair shops are all over Europe as well (a ton of them here in Scandinavia). It's mostly just parts swapping, I bet 90% of their business is cracked screens. I'd be willing to bet you can find them in U.S. Chinatowns along with all the unlocked gray-import phone sellers.
girvo 13y ago
Cool article! I've been repairing my own gadgets since my first smartphone in 2005, and have always loved doing it. I even ended up working at a repair shop for 6 months! It used to be a lot easier than is not, unfortunately. Our "obsession" with sleek, thin devices running quad core processors and battery life out the wazoo has the unfortunately required side effect of making things much much harder to self-repair. The worst repair I ever completed, was replacing the LVDS cable and hinge in a first gen MacBook Air. 60 something screws, and complete disassembly and reassembly. I got it right the first time, through sheer dumb luck rather than skill I believe. At this point, I don't bother trying to repair anything other than my iMac, and even that is difficult. It's become too difficult, time consuming, and risky for me to try, and I can only see it getting worse. How do we repair that?
- d0 13y ago
  Very good question. The only thing I can think of, at least in the EU, is get them to consider repairs in electronic waste legislation. If a device is not repairable, it becomes waste. I know people are going to chip in here and crow about Apple's recycling policy for example, but its not the right solution. It takes a lot of energy to extract and recycle materials which could be avoided by not throwing as much stuff away. If it hurts the manufacturers' bottom line, so be it. They've had a free ride for years. Also I think that companies should be forced to issue internal service manuals for all out of warranty products.
- userbinator 13y ago
  > Our "obsession" with sleek, thin devices running quad core processors and battery life out the wazoo has the unfortunately required side effect of making things much much harder to self-repair. I think it's more than just a side-effect. For example, consider the iPhone's non-user-replaceable battery; one of the most commonly heard reasons for it is that it makes for a thinner device and a bigger battery. But an interesting device I saw recently made me question that; the Jiayu G5. It's an Android phone that looks almost exactly like the iPhone (only very slightly larger), with a metal casing and a removable battery plus dual SIM and expandable storage. It's only 0.25mm thicker but its battery has 33% more capacity. If a relatively small Chinese company can come up with something that has iPhone aesthetics but also retains a lot of the repairability, why can't Apple? ( http://www.gizchina.com/2013/09/24/jiayu-g5-teardown/ http://www.gizchina.com/2013/09/24/jiayu-g5-teardown/ )
d0 13y ago
I'm always fixing stuff. Simply because I hate throwing away tech due to some shitty design flaws or a minor component break. So far in the last 12 months: MacBook Pro disk failure (easy), Nokia 820 glass (easy), Sony Vaio VPCJ1 overheating (hard work - about 50 screws and levering plastic), two ThinkPads overheating and fan failure (easy), XBox 360 overheating (easy), Toshiba laptop CMOS batt failure (medium - soldered battery on motherboard), Nokia Asha drowning (easy), disk failure on another Toshiba laptop (easy), numerous software problems on 50+ machines.that looked like hardware, numerous iPhones with broken glass, knackered batteries galore. I don't even do this for a living being but it's extra cash and quite fun. The big thing that always pops up if you look at the above is: broken glass, overheating and clogged cooling systems (dust) and soldered on disposable components. All this was fine until someone brought me an iPad 2 as well with a smashed screen. Was a total bastard to get inside, just like it's suggested in the article. Took me 20 minutes but I'm less forgiving and know how the materials all feel and how durable they are. Absolutely terrible that Apple are guilty for making this situation even worse with their shoddy design. It's annoying because I've got a 2011 MBP I'm using as a workstation at the moment and I'm wary about upgrading it to an rMBP when it's no longer supported and not repairable as there's nothing I can do to an rMBP apart from take it back to the Apple Store and get a replacement (or sue them for our statutory 6-year fit for purpose in the UK). Total disaster on the horizon. Give me a thick, repairable laptop over some thing disposable trinket. My only choice is to go and buy a Delll or a Mac Mini next time.
- f_salmon 13y ago
  > Absolutely terrible that Apple are guilty for making this situation even worse That's what their mission is: Sell as much as possible. (That's the very "clever" idea our economic system is built on.) You're not supposed to keep your stuff for a long time, you're supposed to buy a new one every 1 or 2 years. (The fact that the First World is burning trough several planet Earths on its own (resource-wise) is not of the concern of business leaders of our generation/time, they won't be here anymore when brown stuff really hits the fan.)
  - d0 13y ago
    Couldn't agree more. Not many of us can afford to put down £65/month on a device that lasts a couple of years though. If it lasts 4 years, that's £33/month. Much better. Edit: I expect 5 years daily 8 hour usage from any kit I buy apart from phones and I expect 3 years of the same there.
keithpeter 13y ago
I heard the news story on the radio. I felt a twinge of guilt about the iBook G4 sitting in its box with a dead hard drive. Might have a go at replacing that with a new one (it is a lot of screws, but only screws, no glue to deal with) and putting Debian on it. I prefer recycled laptops now: an X series Duo Core 2 thinkpad (X61(s), X200(s)) can be had for something like £120 in the UK. You can swap the hard drive by undoing a single screw, memory accessible, battery changable (7800mAH battery gives me 8 hours on the X61s). Good to see these small companies springing up. In Birmingham, its the geezer down the market replacing the glass on phones so far.
downandout 13y ago
"Linux is only free if your time has no value" - Jamie Zawisnki This statement may have some applicability here. If you find it fun and interesting to fix your own gadgets, then by all means, go for it. But go into it with the understanding that the value of the time spent on such DIY repairs will likely far exceed any financial savings.
- ctz 13y ago
  You're right, if you consider only the monetary value of the gadgets in question, and ignore other results of fixing your own things (like personal satisfaction, added general knowledge of how things work, value of social interaction in groups like Restart, ability to build or fix higher value devices in the future, externalities in the replacement gadget's production not reflected in the price, etc.) jwz's quote would be better restated: "Linux is only free if your time has no value, and you know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >jwz's quote would be better restated: "Linux is only free if your time has no value, and you know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Really? Who said that if you have other stuff to do with your live you are a cynic? If you just use a Win/Apple box and get done with it, instead of getting "social interaction in Linux groups, general knowledge of how OSes work, etc", and go and DO stuff with your computer -- that implies you know the value of nothing? How about the stuff you actually want to do with the computer (practice law or medicine, write books, create graphics, work for an NGO, control equipment for your lab, etc etc) are more valuable to you that what you get out of mingling with the Linux crowd?
    - VLM 13y ago
      "If you just use a Win... box" How do you do that? Someone volunteered me to be support for my entire family, and I can assure you that things that take seconds in linux take hours/days in windows land if not worse, and there'a a huge number of problems in windows land that simply don't exist in linux land. The primary troubleshooting / repair method seems to be the reinstall OS and all drivers and software, some of which randomly disappears from the internet since last reinstall. Viruses and spyware everywhere, not ready for the enterprise or anything financial related. No software repos. I don't use windows personally other than one gaming partition, but as a family support guy I assure you its a nightmare out there in windows land. OSX not so bad, at least on a desktop. Its competitive with linux. Takes a lot of domain specific knowledge to know when a job is cheaper on OSX or linux. Most people don't do law, medicine, write books, graphics art, work for NGO, or control equipment in a lab. Almost no one does any of that stuff. For most people you install Debian and Chrome and leave them alone. They'll probably need working flash player. That's about it.
r0h1n 13y ago
The article only talks about one reason why Apple (and increasingly most other) gadgets are sealed and unrepairable - "everything is becoming sleeker, smaller, more sealed together and more difficult to open". The other reason is of course planned obsolescence[0]. Given the increased reliability and processing power of modern electronic components, manufacturers don't want consumers repairing & upgrading devices by themselves. How else will they continue to sell a "faster, thinner, sexier" 2.0 device every 12 months to the same consumer? [0] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/planned-obsolescence-460210 http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/planned-obsolesce...
- thedrbrian 13y ago
  Weird. My iPad 2 is on iOS7 and runs fine. It might even be better than the current air since it can do 1920x1080 hdmi output
- maxerickson 13y ago
  There is a tendency for cost tradeoffs to impact reliability. (Which means people are demanding some of the compromises)
- randomdrake 13y ago
  > "everything is becoming sleeker, smaller, more sealed together and more difficult to open" Except, this isn't true, in my experience. At least not with Apple iOS devices. Quite the opposite. Apple is starting to offer repair services for their iOS line, particularly phones, and their devices haven't gotten harder to open up and repair, they've gotten easier. The iPad 2 is notoriously one of the hardest, repairable iOS devices to dig into. The iPad iterations after the iPad 2 are much, much easier. The iPhone 5 take just a few minutes to replace the screen. Source: I worked for one of the largest iOS device repair companies.
  - sigmar 13y ago
    It is pretty hard to look at the use of proprietary pentalobe screws in all apple hardware and not come to the conclusion that they are actively discouraging DIY repairs
aidos 13y ago
On a related note I dug out an old BBC computer the other day. There were 4 screws on the bottom, each with an arrow pointing at them, each labelled 'FIX'.
owenversteeg 13y ago
I'm a vintage calculator collector and it's always fun to see how calculators went from extremely repairable in the 60s-70s to impossible to repair in the 90s (like an iPad.) This is partly due to the fact that some vintage calculators cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when they were introduced. I was repairing a scientific calculator from the 70s yesterday, and literally every component could be repaired. You could actually order parts (new keys, new display, new faceplate, etc.) from the company. This is in contrast to a calculator of the mid 80s which usually had four screws but was difficult to repair or a calculator of the 90s and later that was usually a sealed unit (with everything on one chip.) It seems the same thing is happening to computers, with a timescale delayed 20 years.

48 points by schrofer 13y ago

Not sure if this happens everywhere, but in our neighbourhoods (small towns) there are small businesses poppping up all the time who can fix iPhones/iPads (and even Androids, but that's a lot less common) for you and they fix it for, what I would consider, amounts of money which are in fact ridiculous. I had the front, back, home button and battery of an iPhone 4s replaced for E35. I fixed iphones myself before and I wouldn't do it for E80 excluding materials; this guy does it including. And this is not an exception; a lot of jobless women and men are offering this and making E5-E10 per phone or tablet for their time. If you buy your replacement yourself, you only pay that cost, so if you think you can do better than E30 for a replacement package or if you think you want better materials, that works too.

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
E? €?
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Yes € :)
userbinator 13y ago
China? That's what comes to mind. You can get your laptop's motherboard troubleshooted and serviced at the component level, and chipsets reballed and reflowed while you wait, at a fraction of the cost of doing it in the West.
- kalleboo 13y ago
  Mom and Pop cell phone repair shops are all over Europe as well (a ton of them here in Scandinavia). It's mostly just parts swapping, I bet 90% of their business is cracked screens. I'd be willing to bet you can find them in U.S. Chinatowns along with all the unlocked gray-import phone sellers.

girvo 13y ago

Cool article! I've been repairing my own gadgets since my first smartphone in 2005, and have always loved doing it. I even ended up working at a repair shop for 6 months! It used to be a lot easier than is not, unfortunately. Our "obsession" with sleek, thin devices running quad core processors and battery life out the wazoo has the unfortunately required side effect of making things much much harder to self-repair. The worst repair I ever completed, was replacing the LVDS cable and hinge in a first gen MacBook Air. 60 something screws, and complete disassembly and reassembly. I got it right the first time, through sheer dumb luck rather than skill I believe. At this point, I don't bother trying to repair anything other than my iMac, and even that is difficult. It's become too difficult, time consuming, and risky for me to try, and I can only see it getting worse. How do we repair that?

d0 13y ago
Very good question. The only thing I can think of, at least in the EU, is get them to consider repairs in electronic waste legislation. If a device is not repairable, it becomes waste. I know people are going to chip in here and crow about Apple's recycling policy for example, but its not the right solution. It takes a lot of energy to extract and recycle materials which could be avoided by not throwing as much stuff away. If it hurts the manufacturers' bottom line, so be it. They've had a free ride for years. Also I think that companies should be forced to issue internal service manuals for all out of warranty products.
userbinator 13y ago
> Our "obsession" with sleek, thin devices running quad core processors and battery life out the wazoo has the unfortunately required side effect of making things much much harder to self-repair. I think it's more than just a side-effect. For example, consider the iPhone's non-user-replaceable battery; one of the most commonly heard reasons for it is that it makes for a thinner device and a bigger battery. But an interesting device I saw recently made me question that; the Jiayu G5. It's an Android phone that looks almost exactly like the iPhone (only very slightly larger), with a metal casing and a removable battery plus dual SIM and expandable storage. It's only 0.25mm thicker but its battery has 33% more capacity. If a relatively small Chinese company can come up with something that has iPhone aesthetics but also retains a lot of the repairability, why can't Apple? ( http://www.gizchina.com/2013/09/24/jiayu-g5-teardown/ http://www.gizchina.com/2013/09/24/jiayu-g5-teardown/ )

d0 13y ago

I'm always fixing stuff. Simply because I hate throwing away tech due to some shitty design flaws or a minor component break. So far in the last 12 months: MacBook Pro disk failure (easy), Nokia 820 glass (easy), Sony Vaio VPCJ1 overheating (hard work - about 50 screws and levering plastic), two ThinkPads overheating and fan failure (easy), XBox 360 overheating (easy), Toshiba laptop CMOS batt failure (medium - soldered battery on motherboard), Nokia Asha drowning (easy), disk failure on another Toshiba laptop (easy), numerous software problems on 50+ machines.that looked like hardware, numerous iPhones with broken glass, knackered batteries galore. I don't even do this for a living being but it's extra cash and quite fun. The big thing that always pops up if you look at the above is: broken glass, overheating and clogged cooling systems (dust) and soldered on disposable components. All this was fine until someone brought me an iPad 2 as well with a smashed screen. Was a total bastard to get inside, just like it's suggested in the article. Took me 20 minutes but I'm less forgiving and know how the materials all feel and how durable they are. Absolutely terrible that Apple are guilty for making this situation even worse with their shoddy design. It's annoying because I've got a 2011 MBP I'm using as a workstation at the moment and I'm wary about upgrading it to an rMBP when it's no longer supported and not repairable as there's nothing I can do to an rMBP apart from take it back to the Apple Store and get a replacement (or sue them for our statutory 6-year fit for purpose in the UK). Total disaster on the horizon. Give me a thick, repairable laptop over some thing disposable trinket. My only choice is to go and buy a Delll or a Mac Mini next time.

f_salmon 13y ago
> Absolutely terrible that Apple are guilty for making this situation even worse That's what their mission is: Sell as much as possible. (That's the very "clever" idea our economic system is built on.) You're not supposed to keep your stuff for a long time, you're supposed to buy a new one every 1 or 2 years. (The fact that the First World is burning trough several planet Earths on its own (resource-wise) is not of the concern of business leaders of our generation/time, they won't be here anymore when brown stuff really hits the fan.)
- d0 13y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Not many of us can afford to put down £65/month on a device that lasts a couple of years though. If it lasts 4 years, that's £33/month. Much better. Edit: I expect 5 years daily 8 hour usage from any kit I buy apart from phones and I expect 3 years of the same there.

keithpeter 13y ago

I heard the news story on the radio. I felt a twinge of guilt about the iBook G4 sitting in its box with a dead hard drive. Might have a go at replacing that with a new one (it is a lot of screws, but only screws, no glue to deal with) and putting Debian on it. I prefer recycled laptops now: an X series Duo Core 2 thinkpad (X61(s), X200(s)) can be had for something like £120 in the UK. You can swap the hard drive by undoing a single screw, memory accessible, battery changable (7800mAH battery gives me 8 hours on the X61s). Good to see these small companies springing up. In Birmingham, its the geezer down the market replacing the glass on phones so far.

downandout 13y ago

"Linux is only free if your time has no value" - Jamie Zawisnki This statement may have some applicability here. If you find it fun and interesting to fix your own gadgets, then by all means, go for it. But go into it with the understanding that the value of the time spent on such DIY repairs will likely far exceed any financial savings.

ctz 13y ago
You're right, if you consider only the monetary value of the gadgets in question, and ignore other results of fixing your own things (like personal satisfaction, added general knowledge of how things work, value of social interaction in groups like Restart, ability to build or fix higher value devices in the future, externalities in the replacement gadget's production not reflected in the price, etc.) jwz's quote would be better restated: "Linux is only free if your time has no value, and you know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
- coldtea 13y ago
  >jwz's quote would be better restated: "Linux is only free if your time has no value, and you know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Really? Who said that if you have other stuff to do with your live you are a cynic? If you just use a Win/Apple box and get done with it, instead of getting "social interaction in Linux groups, general knowledge of how OSes work, etc", and go and DO stuff with your computer -- that implies you know the value of nothing? How about the stuff you actually want to do with the computer (practice law or medicine, write books, create graphics, work for an NGO, control equipment for your lab, etc etc) are more valuable to you that what you get out of mingling with the Linux crowd?
  - VLM 13y ago
    "If you just use a Win... box" How do you do that? Someone volunteered me to be support for my entire family, and I can assure you that things that take seconds in linux take hours/days in windows land if not worse, and there'a a huge number of problems in windows land that simply don't exist in linux land. The primary troubleshooting / repair method seems to be the reinstall OS and all drivers and software, some of which randomly disappears from the internet since last reinstall. Viruses and spyware everywhere, not ready for the enterprise or anything financial related. No software repos. I don't use windows personally other than one gaming partition, but as a family support guy I assure you its a nightmare out there in windows land. OSX not so bad, at least on a desktop. Its competitive with linux. Takes a lot of domain specific knowledge to know when a job is cheaper on OSX or linux. Most people don't do law, medicine, write books, graphics art, work for NGO, or control equipment in a lab. Almost no one does any of that stuff. For most people you install Debian and Chrome and leave them alone. They'll probably need working flash player. That's about it.

r0h1n 13y ago

The article only talks about one reason why Apple (and increasingly most other) gadgets are sealed and unrepairable - "everything is becoming sleeker, smaller, more sealed together and more difficult to open". The other reason is of course planned obsolescence[0]. Given the increased reliability and processing power of modern electronic components, manufacturers don't want consumers repairing & upgrading devices by themselves. How else will they continue to sell a "faster, thinner, sexier" 2.0 device every 12 months to the same consumer? [0] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/planned-obsolescence-460210 http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/planned-obsolesce...

thedrbrian 13y ago
Weird. My iPad 2 is on iOS7 and runs fine. It might even be better than the current air since it can do 1920x1080 hdmi output
maxerickson 13y ago
There is a tendency for cost tradeoffs to impact reliability. (Which means people are demanding some of the compromises)
randomdrake 13y ago
> "everything is becoming sleeker, smaller, more sealed together and more difficult to open" Except, this isn't true, in my experience. At least not with Apple iOS devices. Quite the opposite. Apple is starting to offer repair services for their iOS line, particularly phones, and their devices haven't gotten harder to open up and repair, they've gotten easier. The iPad 2 is notoriously one of the hardest, repairable iOS devices to dig into. The iPad iterations after the iPad 2 are much, much easier. The iPhone 5 take just a few minutes to replace the screen. Source: I worked for one of the largest iOS device repair companies.
- sigmar 13y ago
  It is pretty hard to look at the use of proprietary pentalobe screws in all apple hardware and not come to the conclusion that they are actively discouraging DIY repairs

aidos 13y ago

On a related note I dug out an old BBC computer the other day. There were 4 screws on the bottom, each with an arrow pointing at them, each labelled 'FIX'.

owenversteeg 13y ago

I'm a vintage calculator collector and it's always fun to see how calculators went from extremely repairable in the 60s-70s to impossible to repair in the 90s (like an iPad.) This is partly due to the fact that some vintage calculators cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when they were introduced. I was repairing a scientific calculator from the 70s yesterday, and literally every component could be repaired. You could actually order parts (new keys, new display, new faceplate, etc.) from the company. This is in contrast to a calculator of the mid 80s which usually had four screws but was difficult to repair or a calculator of the 90s and later that was usually a sealed unit (with everything on one chip.) It seems the same thing is happening to computers, with a timescale delayed 20 years.