How Repairable Is Your Tablet?
Every time you walk into an electronics store, you’re making a choice. Every gadget you buy is a vote cast. We want people to make informed decisions, as their vote influences how hardware manufacturers choose to design in the future. Some may care that their tablets are easy to repair and upgrade; others may not. For those that do, we’ve aggregated our repairability scores for the best-selling tablets into one convenient resource: our Tablet Repairability List.
We weren’t able to list every single tablet, but this is a good start. We have to disassemble each tablet to score it, so additional hardware will show up as we perform more teardowns. Our hope is that through customers’ votes, manufacturers will create long-lasting, easy-to-repair hardware that we can all love.
Sonos Play:3 Teardown
The gears on the iFixit teardown machine never stop turning. When we spun the crank this time, out spilled the innards of the Sonos Play:3 All-in-One Wireless Music Player. The Play:3 is a modern solution to an age-old problem: listening to whatever you feel like, whenever and wherever you feel like it (so long as you’re at home).
Despite a warranty void sticker and a fair amount of adhesive, the Sonos Play:3 earned a very respectable 8 out of 10 on our repairability scale. Major components are held in place with Phillips #2 screws, and a modular design makes for easy component replacement. Read the rest of this article »
iFixit Community Survey: Win a Nexus 7
Fixers Assemble!
We have a noble quest for you: help fix the world. Share your repair experiences with us by completing the first-ever iFixit Community Survey. We want to know what you fix, how, and why. We’ll analyze the results and share on iFixit.org so we all have a better perspective on the global repair community.
A quest is only as good as its loot—so we have some giveaways: a Nexus 7 (one of the world’s most repairable tablets) and 7 iFixit Pro Tech Toolkits. Winners will be randomly selected from people who complete the survey during the next week. The earlier you complete your survey, the more chances you’ll have to win.
Repair fixes the world—one device at a time. Let’s help the world do it better.
iFixit and Make to Part Ways
Three years ago, we started working with Maker Media—the inspiring people behind Make Magazine and Maker Faire—to see what an open source, community-driven DIY project database would look like. And so, Make: Projects was born—a combination of iFixit’s community technology and Make’s library of great projects. Our goal was to build a Wikipedia of how-to projects, a central repository where ideas could flourish and instructions could get better over time.
Since we launched the site, it has become a popular resource. Make: Projects has more than 3,000 projects. And the site was used by half a million people in December alone.
It is with sadness that I announce Make: Projects will be moving off of iFixit’s Dozuki community platform on February 28. The projects will still be accessible and URLs will be redirected, but it will no longer be in a wiki format. This means that the Make: Projects API will shut off permanently, and any of Make’s HTML embeds used across the internet will stop working.
In addition to the new host of content on makeprojects.com, we’ve posted all of the projects on archive.org. They will remain in their native oManual format, which we developed in conjunction with O’Reilly, so you can use and share the data freely.
I’m more committed than ever to the belief that DIY should be an open source venture. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before, and every time we share what we know, we make the world just a little bit better.
We are makers and we are fixers. Information on how to make, build, and fix things in the real world wants to be free. We want to help make that possible: this week, we’re making our publishing software, Dozuki, free for anyone to host open source, community-driven instruction manuals.
Microsoft Surface Pro Teardown
It seems like just a couple of months ago we took apart the Microsoft Surface. Yet its more powerful sibling — the Surface Pro — found its way onto our teardown table yesterday morning. Oh how time flies when you’re having fun.
We expected the Surface RT and the Pro to share similar internals and disassembly procedures, but it turns out that the Pro is a completely different bag of beans. The display assembly is anchored down with the most adhesive we’ve ever seen on a small device; in fact, it took us well over an hour to figure out how to get inside — an iFixit first. The Surface Pro has some nifty features, like a removable SSD, but that upgradability is marred by non-accessibility to the internals. Adding salt to the wounds, the battery is buried behind the motherboard and glued down to the case. Because of this, the Surface Pro received a 1 out of 10 score on our repairability scale — the worst any tablet has ever received. Read the rest of this article »
VH1: Behind the Teardown
“Set heat gun to ‘impatient’!”
I’m greeted by an angry battle cry as I approach the teardown table late Tuesday morning. As a new iFixit writer, I’ve been hoping to catch a teardown in process for a while now, but the speedy and efficient teardown team is usually packed up by the time I arrive. I didn’t expect to see the Microsoft Surface Pro teardown in action at eleven in the morning, but there appears to be a problem.
Sitting with the Surface Pro in his lap, Andrew can’t remove the front panel of the device. And he’s not thrilled. When I ask how long he and Miro have been trying to separate the front panel, they shake their heads.
“Too long,” Andrew says as he diligently works at the Surface Pro with a guitar pick. “Ugh.”
I take a seat on the floor to watch the action as tech writer Brittany snaps some photos of the frustrated crew. Alternating between the heat gun and guitar picks, the gentlemen have been hard at work severing unyielding adhesive all morning. All teardowns are fueled by coffee and music, and this one isn’t any different: the coffee is freshly brewed as the Ace of Base Pandora station is providing a steady stream of 90s hits. The teardown itself, however, is stalled. Read the rest of this article »
