After the rollout of Apple's 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the team at iFixit has already gone and conducted an in-depth inspection of the huge tablet, which was pretty much expected.
The iPad Pro hit the shelves on Nov. 11, coming in with a ton of powerful and upgraded hardware and features such as the third-generation A9X chip, a 10-hour battery life, a 2,732 x 2,048 resolution, impressive speakers and many more. Other than the features that Apple published, iFixit wanted to know what else the 12.9-inch tablet had in store.
"We've been digging through the cornucopia of Apple's fall lineup, and today, we're thankful to have the last morsel on our teardown table. We're wrapping up in the biggest way we can — with the iPad Pro," iFixit says on the iPad Pro teardown page.
First off, unlike previous iPad models, the iPad Pro's logic board is in the center, which the team notes as something that it's not used to. With the new layout, the display couldn't be set down, as the cables connect in the middle.
iFixit discovered that the iPad Pro's speakers are taking up roughly half the space that the battery does, which means that these bigger speaker boxes came with the price of a reduced battery life.
But the battery is now fitted into the tablet using adhesive tabs instead of being soldered to the board, which makes it considerably easier to remove.
The iFixit team then found a couple of components that Apple didn't care to disclose to the public: two Broadcom BCM15900B0 units, NXP Semiconductors 8416A1 Touch ID Sensor, Parade Technologies DP695 Timing Controller and Texas Instruments TPS65144.
At the end of the iPad Pro teardown, iFixit gave it a three out of 10 repairability score, noting that the Smart Connector port is irreplaceable but unlikely to give out as well as the LCD and front panel being fused together, making the tablet slightly easier to open.
The negatives that the team mentions are the high amount of adhesive that'll make repairs difficult and the fused front panel that increases both the cost of screen repairs and the risk of damaging the LCD when it's opened.
