Apple Sticks It to the DIY Repairman

People have always had an interest in repair. Haynes Manuals helped pave the road for today's do-it-yourself industry more than 50 years ago, providing people with written instructions on how to take apart their cars. Repairs can be taxing and frustrating, especially when the manufacturing company focuses on style and assembly, and not disassembly.

There is a practice called "design for manufacturing" that's becoming more and more common in every stage and generation of devices. Many companies are also now beginning to design for repairability. When these methods are used correctly, the result should be, in theory, a device that can be taken apart just as easily as it is put together.

Apple, though, has followed a path toward iDevice domination. Its goal appears to be to make sure that consumers do not tamper with or even attempt to fix their electronics on their own.

iPhone 2G

The original iPhone does assemble fairly easily, but taking it apart is a totally different story. If you can successfully remove the back metal casing, you expose the guts, revealing a battery that is soldered to a circuit board and a mess of other boards that are tightly packed among flex cables and screws.

A broken or cracked screen is the most common damage to the iPhone 2G. To replace it, you have to strip the entire phone down. The back metal housing is extremely difficult to remove without damaging it. The phone's design, layout, and assembly are not conducive to repairs.

Order of assembly of major components:

Frame
Glass/Screen
Motherboard
Battery
Back housing

iPhone 3G/3Gs

With the iPhone 3G/3GS, Apple offered up a device with a sleek, light and well-put- together design. It was built with a plastic back housing that held an assortment of neatly placed components. The design made this device very repairable.

Ease of assembly and disassembly were pretty consistent in this model. Beginning with the back plastic housing, the major components are neatly packed, with the front screen being the last component to go into the phone when putting it back together.

Since screen and glass replacements are the most common repairs to the iPhone 3G and 3Gs, this generation device ranks very high on the design-for-repair scale. It is built in the opposite order of the first-generation iPhone, and it's the easiest of iPhones to work on.

Order of assembly of major components:

Back housing
Frame
Battery
Motherboard
Glass/Screen

iPhone 4

Apple introduced the newest iPhone with straight lines, solid weight, and a sexy look that makes the competition look like phones that were made 10 years ago. However, it stepped up the difficulty of both assembly and disassembly in this model.

While the initial step -- taking off the back cover -- is super simple, total disassembly and reassembly have proven to be a bit more difficult.

Like the first-generation iPhone, the iPhone 4 screen has the glass and LCD fused together, and this is the first major component to be screwed into the phone. What this means is that you have to strip down the entire phone to replace the most commonly broken feature, the screen.

The iPhone 4 is built in the same order as the first generation iPhone.

Order of assembly of major components:

Frame
Glass/Screen
Motherboard
Battery
Back glass cover

Apple is easing the device-manufacturing process with cost-cutting practices like using adhesive and glue (seen primarily in the iPod touch, iPod nano and iMac), but this is making the repair process more complicated. Sleek design and aesthetics are all the rage, but with this rage come adhesive, glue and parts that often break during repair attempts.

Devices like the iPod touch, iPod nano and the iMac desktop computer have been following the same course as the iPhones. The iPod touch began as a hard-to-repair device, then became much easier in the 2nd and 3rd generations. However, the 4th generation reverted back to being difficult to repair. It is assembled with adhesive and glue throughout, and minimal screws.

The iPod nano was once simple to repair, but as new generations came out with lots of adhesive and glue rather than screws, it became more difficult to repair. The first-generation iMacs were fairly easy to disassemble, whereas the newest generations can only be opened by removing the front glass panel, which is glued to the aluminum frame.

Is this Apple's way of locking down the repair of its products? It does appear that way. The ability to repair electronic devices means they can have a longer life, but that can be seen as a threat that may lower initial sales of new technologies.

Still, as devices break, there will always be those willing to fix rather than throw away and make another purchase. Pentalobular screws, adhesive and glue will not hold back the DIY device repair world.

MacNewsWorld columnist Chris Johncke is a writer and founder of iFixYouri iPhone repair services.