we tore down a lot of devices throughout
2020 and some of them turned out to be
little miracles of thoughtful repairable
design
let's look at the top five or five-ish
most repairable devices we saw in this
very broken year
apple released five iphones in 2020. all
of them received a 6 out of 10 on our
repairability scale but one of them
stands out a little bit
the 2020 version of the iphone se has
the same high points as the iphone 12
models that came out later but there are
some key differences the display still
comes off first
making screen replacements easy and fast
and the screen is an lcd not a fragile
oled
so it'll be pretty cheap to replace once
the parts are available and the battery
can be replaced easily thanks to
wonderful pull tabs
touch id still requires a delicate
transplant and true tone will disappear
with a replacement screen
it also gets low marks for non-standard
screws and a glass back that takes a
full teardown to replace
but what's special about the iphone se
is that it's not a totally brand new
phone
it's based on the iphone 8 so you can
swap the cameras
the sim tray the taptic engine and the
microphones and sensors between them so
while other iphones were heading in a
concerning direction
the iphone se 2020 was something of a
slight fixable relief this year another
small improvement from apple came with
the apple watch series 6. we noticed
this here that it opens like a book that
there was slightly more room to work
inside but what got us excited was
something missing from the watch
a force touch gasket since apple gave up
on that whole two kinds of touch idea
that tricky stubborn part is gone
it still takes a gentle hand but it's a
little bit easier now to get inside this
little wrist computer
before we dug into the playstation 5
itself we got to know its new dual sense
controller
considering that people spend hours
pushing pressing and yeah sometimes
throwing these things
repairability is key luckily you can get
into the ps5 new controller you just
have to know where to look for the
screws
once you're in the battery is easier to
remove than in most smartphones
no glue just one little cable to pull it
out you can remove and swap many of its
components but the charging port and the
joysticks are sadly soldered on
still there's a good chance you can fix
the malfunctioning dual sense and that's
a good thing
the hard part of owning an xbox series x
or a playstation 5
at least right now is just finding and
buying one it's easy to get into both
the ps5 mothership and the series x
refrigerator
and once you're in you can pretty
handily swap out the fan
replace the power supplies and even
clean out the heatsinks the only real
sticking point is discs and storage
neither console lets you replace their
optical drive without some tricky board
swapping and soldering and at the moment
you're going to have a tricky time
replacing your xbox or ps5 internal
storage but for what most people will
need to fix over their console's
lifetime
these beefy but cool gaming boxes score
a 7 out of 10.
samsung's galaxy buds live which are
really the galaxy beans because even
samsung thinks so
prove that totally wireless headphones
don't have to be the environmental
disaster of say an
airpod these little guys notch an 8 out
of 10 because you can open them without
a scalpel
don't need special tools to disassemble
them and you can replace the battery in
other individual parts there is some
glue
and you have to go slowly and delicately
when you're working on these tiny
speakers
but fixing or swapping out the battery
is far from impractical
that wraps up our roundup of the most
repairable devices we tore down in 2020.
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