Apple’s newest iPad Pro is remarkably rigid for how thin it is, and apparently also a step forward when it comes to repairability. iFixit shows during its teardown of the tablet that the iPad Pro’s 38.99Wh battery, which will inevitably wear down and need replacement, is actually easy to get to. It’s a change iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari says during the video “could save hours in repair time” compared to past iPad Pro models.
Getting to it still requires removing the screen, which is glued in and is connected to the iPad in four places, but iFixit was essentially able to pull the almost immediately after removing the screen (after removing the camera assembly and dealing with an aluminum lip beneath that, which made some of the tabs hard to get to). For previous models, he notes, you have to pull out “every major component.”
After that, though, the thinness proves to be an issue for iFixit, as many of the parts are glued in, including the tablet’s logic board.
But you can’t say the same for Apple’s new $129 Apple Pencil Pro, which shouldn’t shock anyone. iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari was forced to cut into the pencil using an ultrasonic cutter, a moment he presented as “the world’s worst ASMR video.” (That happens just after the five-minute mark, in case you want to mute the video right there to avoid the ear-piercing squeal of the tool.) Unlike the iPad Pro itself, the Pencil Pro’s battery was the last thing he could get to.
By the time Mokhtari is done, the pencil is utterly destroyed, of course. He says the site will have a full chip ID soon that will include images of the MEMS sensor that drives the pencil’s barrel roll feature that lets you twist the pencil to adjust the rotation of on-screen art tools.