iPad Air peels off in racy pics for wide-eyed geeks, reveals 'worst battery ever

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

How often do you take your phone or tablet apart?

If it's broken? Pretty regularly. I'll happily rip a gadget to pieces if I can fix it myself.

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

TV never; I threw mine out years ago. Washing machine, more recently. It's amazing how long an appliance will work when one can replace moving parts.

WRT IT... I've been in the manufacturing R&D side of electronics for 30 years, though now only part time as I as trying to retire, and while once upon a time I had to repair laptops under test to continue testing, for my own now, if they're cheap enough to replace, I don't need to.

Desktops and towers are another story; easy-peasy.

ARE Surface et amici cheap enough? That depends how often they need repair, doesn't it?

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

"How often do you take your phone or tablet apart?"

Even if you never do, wouldn't you prefer a technician to be able to open it and swap some insignificant (or significant, for that matter) broken part in a matter of minutes and at a cost or a few currency units, rather than throw away the whole device?

To say nothing about planned upgradability.

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

"How often do you take your phone or tablet apart?"

Not often. But just dismantled the wife's Nexus to stick in a new screen and digitiser after accident damage. If that were glued up then it would have been a throw away.

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

To replace the battery? About once a year, though in my case, the only tools I need are a couple of fingernails.

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

Washing machines are quite regularly fixed, no?

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

Well, I had to take my washing machine apart just a few weeks ago, to replace a door seal £25 including P&P . If you suggesting that they should be designed just like Apple Ipads - throw then away and spend another £800 instead of £25? Are you mad ?

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

If we move back to homegrown production and higher prices then perhaps things will have to last longer and be more upgradable or repairable?

But technology moves on fast and people do tend to get used to things being chuckable.

Earlier today I replaced the battery in my Braun electric toothbrush. It required some disassembly, desoldering and soldering. The only reason I could open the thing was due to it being designed to be recycled. It's lasted me about 5 years, so it's not done too badly. But I refuse to buy another one simply because the battery is aging.

But that is just a toothbrush, I can't imagine one I would buy now being anymore advanced?

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

Fair enough, I won't then. I've repaired an iPhone 3G before as they're fairly easy to disasemble (and replacing the screen on one myself was FAR cheaper than getting Apple to do it). Other than that, I'll stick with my Samsung phone which has a user-replaceable battery and an iFixit score of 9/10. At least I know if I drop it that replacing the screen is possible.

And even if I can't do it myself, the higher the iFixit score, the cheaper it's likely to be for a 3rd party repairer to do the job. Take an iPad Air to the guy on the market and I bet half of them will just refuse these days.

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

"can't hit corporate margins without hitting end user prices."

Ultimately yes. But if there's an additonal cost associated with non-serviceable products, then the company has to consider whether it wants that as extra margin, or will pay the cost. Broadly speaking most devices made by most makers aren't price setters, and the price is set by what the market will pay. In that case a corporate tax is not a readily passed on cost, even though it is ultimately out of customer's pockets. The point then is that with a more serviceable product the company would charge the same, but keep more of the income.

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

Can I offer the suggestion that it's not the actual battery itself that the iFixit guy is complaining about, but the way that it's been fixed to the case with half a ton of glue? Perhaps half a ton of glue where a couple of screws or a couple of small blobs of glue would have been equally sufficient?

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

"Bottom line is Apple have fitted a 64-bit, potentially much faster CPU, slimmed the device down and made it much lighter while keeping the same battery life (which was already great) - sounds pretty good to me."

I can't quite tell whether you are inferring that being 64-bit make a CPU "potentially much faster". I hope you aren't. But just in case anyone reads this post and makes that assumption. Being 64 bit actually has a nasty habit of making things significantly slower. The only reason to need a 64 bit CPU is if you are running out of address space due to your process size going over 4GB.

Why does 64 bit slow you down? Well, firstly the executable size is bigger. This is obvious because everywhere you refer to a memory location in your code, you take up twice the space for it. Secondly, the process size is bigger for the same reason. What this means is that your use of processor cache (L1, L2, L3, etc.) is much less efficient.

64 bit is not necessarily better.

Re: Recyclable not landfillable

Most modern industrial adhesives are complex and chemically unpleasant so while you are wasting energy toasting them in an oven you are also releasing nasty stuff into the atmosphere making that kind of recycling more unlikely or at least less efficient. Undoing a few screws to strip down a scrap item on the other hand is pretty easy if you don't have to worry about putting it back together.

For the fanbois, I am criticising Microsoft for their use of glues too but if you really want to down vote me knock yourself out.

Really! knock yourself out!

Re: The point is

Fixit were able to take it apart, that means any number of people running little kiosks and shops can do the same. The fixit guys aren't magicians... and they presumably only tried on one unit. Someone running a business of replacing your battery will do this hundreds of times and get VERY good at it.