IPad Teardown

Its been quite a while since we’ve featured something from iFixit. But when we saw they had torn apart the next greatest Apple product, the iPadreleased today, and how everyone on our team loves it, we thought why not also let our user base enjoy the destruction informative teardown as well.

In both the original and the FCC teardown, we see some awesome features and tricks Apple implemented. Most notably the two separate 3.75V lithium polymer cells, not soldered to the motherboard, allowing users to easily replace the battery if need be. However, in the opposite respect, more components than ever are being epoxied to the board, making the iPad much more rugged.

We’re left wondering, with everyone able to see the beautiful insides, does it change anyone’s mind on getting an iPad? Or would you rather make your own?

63 thoughts on “IPad Teardown

  1. @devin and the other “non-nerds”:

    This is not a site for you. Take your flame-bait over to gizmodo or another equally luser-ish site. It’s a good place for people that THINK they know what they are talking about when it comes to technology.
    ignorant laymen are the worst….

  2. “My laptop is too big to actually sit on a lap so that eliminates portability. Even my netbook is too bulky for comfortable use unless I can set it up on a table.”
    Really? Your netbook is too bulky?

    iPad is a youtube player and a thing to check the movie showtimes. But wait, you can do that on any decent mobile phone! Even my phone has a real keyboard. I won’t use anything without a real keyboard.

  3. “iPad is a youtube player and a thing to check the movie showtimes. ”

    Well, it can’t even do youtube right at the moment, since it’s flash based.

    Unless they converted to HTML5 over the weekend and I missed it or something…

  4. “iPad, sounds like a woman’s feminine hygiene product that “twitters” when shes having a heavy or light day… thar she flows again!”

    That seals it. I’ve officially got my next project idea! No more worries about going down “there” during the wrong time for me!

  5. Someone really find youtube valuable? (I’m not talking about hosting service, just content) Isnt it just world largest video pile of screaming kids and tripod hating alcoholics (why else the shaking camera so much :D)
    On the other hand, there is much more valuable video resources with new movies and/or good sorted libraries and 90% of them run on Flash.

  6. does it change anyone’s mind on getting an iPad?
    not mine. i never wanted it. the next logical step after a teardown is to put that touchscreen on something worth a shit.
    i don’t think the iPad will market well to its target demographic. if that’s the word i’m looking for. sure, someone might buy it because it looks cool or something, but..
    say the target demographic is the millions of people who use social networking sites, such as facebook and myspace, who are often addicted to flash games such as farmville, yoville, countless other -villes, anything made by zynga or playdom.. either they won’t buy it because it doesn’t support flash, or they will purchase it without doing their research, and then be pissed, because they are addicted to farmville or whatever, and they wanted to use their finger instead of a mouse, and go portable. unless it does support flash? anyone care to clarify that?
    i have an ancient laptop that is built like that ipad. all the crap built on a chip.. i was like where the hell is the cpu? then i took apart a different laptop made around the same time, it had a full motherboard complete with a removable cpu. i really don’t know what an iPad would be good for though. paint? email? but it doesn’t support flash, right? and youtube, grooveshark, pandora, and countless other entertainment websites require flash player.. in conclusion, the iPad would be a very useful piece of technology, in ~1995 or earlier, given that we had wifi back then. in 1995 technology it would only be about 3 or 4x thicker and 20x heavier with NiCd or NiMH if you’re lucky(and rich as fuck) i think the iPad sucks and is practically useless and overpriced, but i would pay $100 more for a REAL tabletcomputer, 2 or 3x thicker, with a nice sized SSD, USB ports, with some RAM and CPU thrown in. and we should move away from optical media, but a disc drive wouldnt hurt for now, but i would expect them to be eradicated in 5 years since we already have 32gb microSDHC. if i bought a ps4 or xbox1080 i would expect to be able to purchase my collection on something more like that. i have seen a couple movies/games available on usb flash drive. i think it was Transformers 2? and WoW. flash drives would be a viable option, as long as they are kept a standard size/shape, give them a deep hole to plug in, so you cant break them by accidental collision. microSD would probably be more difficult and expensive to produce, being all micro.. but you could keep your collection in a little book like the old game genie book for game boy, or in a friggin’ piggy bank. warning: your post is over 9000 characters long. plz stop typing

  7. @morphoyle the transvaginal envirotweeting submarine-pon?
    hmmm. be better if i could make it a complete acronym..
    something that kinda makes sense, like: the Tweeting.Autonomous.Monitoring.Personal.Ovulation.Nanite?

  8. How does the saying go? something like:
    “Too many choices never brings happiness”?

    anywhat a way to get more power out of the ‘pad is to use its VNC client (remote desktop) so that you can use your main ‘puter’s power with the ‘pad

    Sorry, I’m having fun with the ‘ key’s ‘liness

  9. I dunno about you guys, but if I could figure out how to throw android or something of the like on an ltsp server on my VMware machine in the closet, and pass that out to the ipad on bootup (i know wifi doesn’t do pxe, but you could have an sd card or something that boots it into gpxe) and runs all the hardcore stuff on the vm, so that everything would be nice and slick.
    If linux runs on it, you could even run xubuntu or something as long as there are multitouch drivers and an onscreen keyboard, I think there is probably a better version that than, but anyways.

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