
My quest to fix a broken iPad - schrofer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26197229
======
downandout
_" 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
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
> _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
"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.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
I've had a linux machine at work since new year's , and I've been an OSX user
since 2004. I'd say that my I've lost more time to that linux machine in two
months than I've lost to OSX in two years, and that's not even counting the
microannoyances in the UI.

------
girvo
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_?

~~~
userbinator
> 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/)
)

~~~
collyw
I have no idea about this phone, but the iPhone is relatively powerful. Is
this phone in the same league? If you have a phone that operates at half the
speed or lower screen resolution it could easily be responsible for a better
battery life, no?

~~~
userbinator
The iPhone 5s certainly has a more powerful processor (the original 5 is
around the same as the G5) but the battery in the G5 actually has more
capacity: 2000mAh for the G5 vs 1570mAh for the 5s (and 1440mAh for the
original 5). The display is also larger: 1280x720 vs 1136x640.

------
d0
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
> 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.)

~~~
coldtea
> _That 's what their mission is: Sell as much as possible. (That's the very
> "clever" idea our economic system is built on.)_

For a company with such a mission they surely failed miserably. Given the high
lifespan of most of their computers, and the undisputably high resale value
you get for them even after 3-4 years.

Or, perhaps their mission is: make our high-end industrial designs smaller,
lighter and quiter even if it means they are less serviseable, because
computers should be commodities who just use, not something for tinkerers.

~~~
d0
Problem is that all my customers are consumers and want repairs.

And 3-4 years is if you are lucky. Macs are pretty reliable but when they do
go wrong, it's always expensive and catastrophic.

A good friend of mine worked in an Apple Store in London and they had a scary
high number of machines with logic board failures in 2012. That never gets
recorded on the stats because the machines disappear and come back magically
working with no explanation as to what was wrong.

They are pretty good at replacements though. I've had several pairs of earbuds
replaced for nothing because they've died.

~~~
coldtea
> _And 3-4 years is if you are lucky. Macs are pretty reliable but when they
> do go wrong, it 's always expensive and catastrophic._

Well, if it's under 3 years, then you're covered under warranty, no?

> _A good friend of mine worked in an Apple Store in London and they had a
> scary high number of machines with logic board failures in 2012. That never
> gets recorded on the stats because the machines disappear and come back
> magically working with no explanation as to what was wrong._

Well, there's not much of an explanation I guess. It just happens that certain
productions runs are faulty. Could be a misaligned machine at the factory,
some part outsourced that had lower tolerance than expected, etc.

These things happens when you have runs of several million exact same machines
outsourced to several factories. So a faulty run of some thousands could have
been dropped in London. What could Apple do? Post a bulletin that this sub-
component of the logic board is faulty and have users attempt fix it? The
logical thing to do was to replace the whole thing and perhaps sell the old
machines as refurbished models.

(There was a similar problem with logic boards on G3 iBooks, back around 2003
or so. And there are always problems with a percentage of any production run,
sometimes with hard disks, displays, GPUs, whatever. No way to avoid it,
nothing is perfect. They cant even test most of those beforehand, because some
are issues that develop after some use, and people are always demanding faster
delivery and complaint of stores not stocking new models fast enough).

------
tluyben2
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.

~~~
userbinator
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
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.

------
r0h1n
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-
obsolesce...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/planned-
obsolescence-460210)

~~~
randomdrake
> "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.

~~~
r0h1n
Since I don't have any first hand experience of having repaired iDevices, I'll
go by iFixit's scores. Let's take the current+last generation of their
repairability scores for the iPhone and iPad (10/10 being the most
repairable):

iPhone 5s: 6/10 iPhone 5: 7/10

iPad Air: 2/10 iPad 4: 2/10

Based on these I can't see how Apple's devices are getting easier to open or
repair?

~~~
randomdrake
That's quite interesting. I don't know what iFixit uses for their scoring
system, so I couldn't comment on their findings.

I left the company as repairs for the 5s and newer iPads were just becoming
more popular.

It's possible that they were getting better up to the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 and
have started to decline since. Repairing devices and offering repairs for
screen replacements and such, in-store, is fairly new for Apple. I wouldn't be
surprised if they were on their way towards making repairs easier but realized
they were making it a bit _too_ easy and went back on it.

The 5 was so easy to open up and repair compared to the 4s and the 3 compared
to the 2 was night and day.

So, maybe it was just a temporary blip on the radar and there wasn't a trend
at all. Or, there was a trend and it was intentionally reversed. But it at
least _seemed_ to be the direction things were headed.

Either way: I updated my original comment to include "in my experience" if
they really have gotten worse again.

------
keithpeter
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.

------
owenversteeg
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.

------
aidos
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'.

