[tfandango]

I'm a little sour on Apple. They say their products are rugged and "built to last", but an iPad is mostly glass which you need to encase in a giant rubber protective case if you don't want the screen shattered. Even then they are easy to break and very costly to fix, to the point now where it barely makes sense to fix it over replace it. Self-Repair is less expensive but so far I'm 50/50 on successes. I would say they are built to last, until the next one comes out.

[secstate]

The killer part is that it's only expensive to repair because Apple has opted not to streamline a repair pipeline. There is absolutely no way a digitizer glued to a piece of glass costs $500 otherwise they'd never make another iPad.

But if they price the part hideously expensively it makes buying a new one a no-brainer. Working in a school for a few years, I was amazed how easily and inexpensively I could replace screens and memory on 2008-era white macbooks when I had access to school channels for parts priced at cost (or close enough). I think we had access to those channels as a stipulation in a state contract to buy assloads of those machines for every kid in the state.