The Unrepairable iPad Air

The iFruit company’s iPad Air is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth-generation iPad. IHS iSuppli found that Apple also built its latest tablet for about $42 less than its third-generation iPad (comparing the WiFi-only, entry-level versions of each), while iFixit, during its own teardown, found what Apple calls a "big leap ahead" to be several steps in the wrong direction, where repairability and environmental responsibility are concerned.

"For every fixable Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, there's a Surface Pro—or in this case, an iPad Air—to saturate the market with unrepairable devices," iFixit Chief Information Architect Miro Djuric wrote in blog post Nov. 1, the day the iPad Air went on sale.

iFixit's big gripe with the iPad Air is its battery, which is secured with lots of glue, screwed in, and still requires the removal of the logic board before it can be separated from its housing. The front panel also didn't escape the glue bottle. "It's glued to the rest of the device, greatly increasing the chances of cracking the glass during a repair," said iFixit.

Celebrating the small victory of the LCD being easy to remove once the front panel was off, the team gave the iPad Air a repairability score of 2 out of 10.