iPad 7 Teardown Show Little Change

iFixit posted its teardown of the iPad 7.  It found very little to differentiate if from its predecessor.

Well there you have it, the 10.2″ iPad 6 iPad 7 laid out after facing the business end of a teardown. This turned out to be a pretty light refresh! Just a size increase, the addition of a Smart Connector, and an extra GB of RAM. The display and digitizer still aren’t fused together, despite the addition of Pro-like features, which is something we’re very happy to see survive. Non-laminated, separately replaceable cover glass and LCD makes most screen repairs far less expensive. The LCD is simple to remove once you separate the cover glass/digitizer. As with all iPads, a solid barrier of very strong adhesive hinders all repairs. The Lightning port, a common point of failure, is soldered to the logic board. More adhesive holds nearly everything else in place. Battery and logic board replacements are particularly obnoxious.

 

 

 

Galaxy Fold is Available For Purchase in U.S.

After a five-month delay, and a lot of mockery, Samsung’s Galaxy Fold is finally available to purchase in the U.S. Techcrunch reports there are still some problems with the device.

Five months after originally planned, the Galaxy Fold goes on sale today in the U.S. The handset has had its share of setbacks, of course. The first round ran into problems from several reviewers for a variety of reasons. And as I outlined yesterday, I ran into my own issues with the reinforced version of the handset. Even in its current version, the Galaxy Fold is a fragile thing. That’s something Samsung has been abundantly cautious about disclosing, through a video pleading to “just use a light touch” and a lot of paperwork that ships with the device. I’ll be giving more thoughts on my time with the product in an upcoming write-up. In the meantime, however, anyone thinking of plunking down the $2,000 (and up) needs to factor that into the equation.

What is Happening with Apple's AR Glasses?

There’s a lot of excitement around the iPhone 11, new Apple Watches, iPads and so on. Wired though looked to the future, and how Apple is progressing in developing AR devices.

How Apple gets from phone-tethered smart-glasses to something a fully realized spatial-computing platform—or how long it takes to do so—remains unclear, but elements of the road map are hidden in plain sight. “A lot of the tech they’ve already built and fully deployed is critical to their goal of building a discreet AR HMD platform,” Kuang says. As an example, he points to last week’s announcement that the iPhone 11 models could take photos of pets in Portrait Mode: “That’s a good example of them working in little tweaks that don’t appear to have relevance to AR, but are super-meaningful if you’re a developer. The ability to recognize nonhuman faces significantly expands your ability to build tools and experiences.”