Recently a family member dropped her “*iPad,*”:http://www.smalldog.com/iPads shattering the glass face of the device. When she brought the iPad to a local Apple store, she discovered that Apple’s replacement cost was $300. Had the iPad been covered by AppleCare+ (a $99 investment in the first 30 days after purchasing the device), it would have cost her $49. With that information she decided to purchase a new iPad (with AppleCare+).
She then called me and asked if she could repair the broken iPad and sell it to a friend to recover some of the cost of buying a new device. The first question I asked was how it fell. The possibility of repair is predicated on whether one of the rounded corners of the iPad ended up being the point of impact. Fortunately for her, it landed straight on the glass front of the device.
I offered to repair it, not knowing what I would be getting myself into. She shipped the iPad to me while I went to the web and started purchasing replacement parts. The first place I visited was iFixit. Here, I purchased their “*iOpener tool*”:http://www.ifixit.com/Tools/iOpener/IF145-198?utm_medium=email&utm_source=emailblast&utm_campaign=tt-iopener for $15 which includes a long cloth pouch full of high-heat capacity material (much like the neck warmers you heat up in the microwave), two plastic opening tools, and eight guitar picks. I went to Amazon to purchase a $30 replacement digitizer (glass front piece) and a $2 metal spudger.
I went to work with iFixit’s iPad repair guide. As I heated up the “iOpener” and applied the heat to the glass surface of the iPad, I began to pry at the seam between glass and the plastic frame. Unfortunately, because the glass had shattered into so many pieces, it was extremely difficult to remove the glass. When the glass has shattered into thousands of pieces, heat is not as important as having a sharp tool to scrape the adhesive and glass off the aluminum frame.
I grabbed a heat gun, some safety goggles, a pair of gloves, and went to work with the metal spudger. By the time I had removed all the glass I had destroyed the plastic frame and Wi-Fi antenna. Six dollars later on Amazon and $4 at my local hardware store for krazy glue, I had replaced the Wi-Fi antenna and adhered the plastic frame to the aluminum chassis.
The home button is effectively suspended between the glass, a bracket, and two contacts on a circuit board fixed to the inside of the aluminum case. I tried to measure this to the best of my ability and adhered the button and bracket to the glass digitizer. Then, I connected the digitizer cable, connected the display cable and screwed in the display.
Next came the hard part. With compressed air and a microfiber cloth, I attempted to clean the display. Then I ran a strip down of krazy glue along the aluminum frame, removed the plastic covering the inside of the glass digitizer, and attempted to seat the glass digitizer within the plastic frame.
Unfortunately, my calculations were off with the home button bracket, making it impossible to seat the glass toward the bottom of the device. I ended up creating a crack in the glass between the home button and the bottom of the iPad. When I tried to seat the glass, excess krazy glue got on my fingers, the only instrument I had to apply pressure to the glass bezel — krazy glue residue instantly stuck to the smooth surface of the white frame (luckily, I didn’t touch the business part of the glass).
After, I realized that the power button, while it could still be used to power the device on and off, would not function to sleep or wake the iPad (making the device a lot more cumbersome to use).
After the “repair,” I called up my family member and explained my attempt (failure). We both agreed that her friend would not enjoy using the device. I recommended eBay after seeing broken iPads with bids upwards of $150 and she said go for it! I was pleasantly surprised when the auction ended and we received $300+ for the not-so-functional iPad.
I learned a lot about this stressful experience and I hope my tips make your next broken iPad experience a little less so.
1. If you’re buying an iPad, purchase AppleCare+. For $99, I can seriously recommend this option as an alternative to a protective case. You’ll enjoy your iPad more when you’re using it and you can be a little less anxious when it does succumb to accidental damage (though certainly it’s not an excuse to be careless).
2. If you don’t purchase AppleCare+ and your iPad breaks within the first year, consider the $300 repair from Apple. 3rd party repairs can cost around half that but will most definitely void whatever remains of your one year warranty from Apple covering manufacturer’s defects.
3. If your iPad breaks after a year, there’s a likely chance that Apple’s released a new device. A brand new iPad is going to look like a pretty good alternative to the $300 repair. Then, try to sell the device on eBay. You might try Craigslist, but I think eBay is going to provide the best chance to recoup as much value as possible.
I can say without hesitation that replacing the glass on the iPad 2/3 is definitely the most difficult repair I have ever performed. As mobile computing becomes more ubiquitous, more and more users will find them in a situation where their device has succumbed to accidental damage.
Repairing that device at a reasonable cost will be essential to helping my three aforementioned tips sound less wasteful. As of this writing, Apple’s iPad is not designed to be repaired. But I have not given up hope considering that the iPhone 5 is the most repairable iPhone yet.
While it’s impossible to know the direction of Apple’s industrial design, if we use the iPhone as a leading indicator, we might expect an iPad that uses less adhesive and more mechanical means of holding the device together — allowing it to come apart (and put back together) with less stress.
