Image credit – iFixit
Last year the folks at iFixit gave the Samsung Galaxy S6 the teardown treatment in which they then rated the phone 4 out of 10 in terms of repairability, which to be honest isn’t particularly fixable. This year they are back again and with a teardown of the recently launched Samsung Galaxy S7, and if anything, it looks like this year’s phone will be harder than ever.
According to iFixit, their latest teardown of the Galaxy S7 has resulted in a score of 3 out of 10, making it harder to repair than last year’s model. However we suppose to be fair, Samsung has included a ton of new hardware features and engineering techniques in this year’s phones, so we suppose some complications are a natural result of that.
The teardown found that one of the reasons why repairing the phone is so difficult is because of its display, in which replacing the glass of the display would essentially destroy the display itself. The use of strong adhesive on the rear glass also makes it incredibly difficult to access the phone, with the risk of the glass cracking in an attempt to get inside.
However the upside is that if the person fixing your phone is skilled enough, the components inside the phone are easily replaceable (save for the display we mentioned earlier) as they appear to be modular in design, meaning that swapping them out for a new and working part seems straightforward enough. Another upside is that its battery can also be replaced with needing to oust the motherboard.
