iFixit Tears Apart a Brand New iPad Pro

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Whenever a new electronic gadget of note becomes available, you can guarantee one thing – iFixit is going to break it.

The popular gadget repair site is always quick to post teardowns of Apple products as they hit the market, including iPods, iPhones, Apple Watches, and more. In fact, the repair site got into hot water with Apple at the beginning of last month when it posted a teardown of the Apple TV, which, at the time, wasn’t yet available to the public.

iFixit Is in Big Trouble with Apple

This time, they waited until after the official release date, and their teardown of the iPad Pro is finally here.

The iFixit team began by prying off the display, which, as is usual with many Apple products, was held on by copious amounts of glue. The display, when compared to that of its main competitor, the Microsoft Surface Pro, is 0.6 inches larger, but 0.16lbs lighter and .155mm lighter than the display in the Surface Pro.

111215-IFIXITIPADPRO-1Underneath the display, iFixit noted that the logic board was moved to the center of the iPad – in previous iPads, the logic board sat a bit off to the side. The team also noticed a Parade Technologies DP695 Timing Controller on the back of the display, which Apple stated is an “iteration of the DP665 LCD timing controller found in the iMac Retina 5K, modified to support the display’s variable refresh rate.”

Another difference was the addition of the iPad Pro’s self-balancing, four-speaker system. The new speaker system, the team noted, took up quite a bit of real estate inside the device. The enclosures hold the speaker drivers, which change functionality depending on whether the device is in landscape or portrait mode, and the back volume chambers, which Apple claims provide up to three times more volume output than previous iPads.

111215-IFIXITIPADPRO-2The impressive new sound system does come at a cost, however – the iFixit team noted that the space taken up by the speaker enclosures could have potentially been used for “an extra 50% battery capacity.”

After finally unearthing the logic board, iFixit noted all of the new specs included on the logic board, including the A9X 64-bit processor. And underneath it all, the iFixit team was able to pull out the impressive 10307 mAh battery, thanks to the eight relatively convenient pull tabs Apple included.

When all was said and done, iFixit gave the iPad Pro a “repairability score” of 3 out of 10, with the only bright spot being the (somewhat) removable battery. Apple’s products, due to their low-profile and sleek design, often score quite low on iFixit’s repairability scale. The site’s popular teardowns of Apple products are traditionally less of a repair guide, and more an interesting look inside the products that we all love. For those that are interesting in taking a peek under the cover of other Apple products, iFixit has quite an impressive library of Apple teardowns.

The iPad Pro is available on Apple’s online store, and should be made available in their retail stores in the very near future. 32GB models are available for $799, the 128GB Wi-Fi only model for $949, and the 128GB model with cellular data for $1079.

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