The Nexus 7 tablet helped renew the iFixit repair team's love of teardowns. iFixit engineers gave the Google Nexus 7 a 7 out of 10, while the Kindle Fire earned an 8 and the iPad 3 a terrible 2.
Tablet teardowns are losing their spark with
repair site iFixit's teardown team. But with Google's new Nexus 7 tablet, the
team found their love renewed, thanks to several smart design decisions on
Google's part.
While iFixit found plenty to be enamored of,
it was the tablet's giant battery that made them want to get physical.
"The Nexus 7 bests the iPad yet again in
that this battery is super easy to replace. It's held down with a tiny
bit of adhesive and there aren't even any screws involved. It's as if Google
wants you to be able to continue using your Nexus 7 long after the battery has
died. Imagine that! A tablet that doesn't come with a built-in death
clock!" iFixit's M.J. said in a video teardown review on the site.
"The sustainability geek in me wants to
hug Google for this," M.J. added. "Can you do that? Hug Google?"
Also to love: The "teardown
ninjas," said M.J., didn't have to spend 45 minutes heat-gunning off the
display, as they did with the iPad 3. The Nexus 7 instead features a series of
clips. A plastic opening tool and some patience, and the team was in, scoring
the Nexus 7 significant "repairability" points.
The difference in these tactics yields a
single millimeter difference in width between the devices; the iPad is
ever-so-slightly thinner.
"We're not all the princess and the pea
here," said M.J. "One millimeter is not discernable in day-to-day
use."
Those iFixit ninjas were also pleased to find
that Googleor rather, really, Asusdecided to use standard screws, instead of
proprietary screws; liked the included near-field communication (NFC) chip; and
found the included front-facing camera and microphone, making video calls a
possibility, "to set the Nexus 7 apart from the pack."
Really, the only complaint the team had was
that, as is common, the LCD assembly is fused to the glass, making it necessary
to also replace the entire assembly, should the glass break.
While it was rumored that a Google tablet
would take aim at the Apple iPad, it's Amazon's Kindle Fire that the Nexus 7 is
more a threat to. iFixit points out that the Nexus 7's display offers 216
pixels per inch (ppi), which falls below the 264 ppi on the iPad 3's Retina
display but out-does the Kindle Fire's 169 ppi.
Likewise, the battery can last just less than
10 hours, while the Kindle Fire's battery can last just less than eight. The
iPad 3, on High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), can run up to 10 hours,
while on Long-Term Evolution (LTE), it lasts approximately 9.5 hours.
Overall, Nexus 7 scored a 7 out of 10 for
repairability, with the iFixit team citing the tablet's easy-to-remove rear
case, those non-fancy screws, the replaceable battery and the ability for a
number of components, including the in-out ports, to be easily replaced. The
only real bummer was the LCD assembly.
In this way, the Nexus 7 was outscored by the
Kindle Fire, which earned a high 8 out of 10. Yet both devices left the iPad 3
in the dust.
The LTE version of Apple's latest tablet was
given a repairability score of just 2 out of 10, with the team complaining that
the front panel is glued to the rest of the device (versus those Nexus 7
clips), "gobs, gobs and gobs of adhesive" hold everything in place,
the LCD is stuck to the front panel with foam sticky tape, increasing the
chances of breaking it during a disassembly, and there's no accessing the front
panel's connector until the LCD is removed.
The
MacBook Pro with Retina display scored a still-worse 1 out of 10.
On the iFixit
blog, Kyle Wiens argued that the matter is a case of consumers' rightsthat
laptops are expensive and people should be able to fix and upgrade them.
He added, of the new MacBook Pro, "Even
though it packs lots of gee-whiz bells and whistles, we were thoroughly
disappointed when we ventured inside. This is, to date, the least repairable
laptop we've taken apart. Apple has packed all the things we hate into one
beautiful little package."
Follow Michelle Maisto on
Twitter.
Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.
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