The age-old game of ‘I did it first’ is irrelevant for this bit of news. The Galaxy S6, according to 9to5Google, got its ‘first’ teardown treatment by iFixit. Yesterday, we covered another ‘first’ teardown of the new flagship from the South Korean giant, but, and for those that want to point fingers, it doesn’t matter who did it first, all that matters is that they were well-done, thorough looks inside an upcoming device. And now, to the real news here: the Galaxy S6 is impressivly compacted inside.
The Galaxy S6, as we noted in yesterday’s piece, as well as in our initial coverage from Mobile World Congress, is impressively thin, light, and stylish, all of which are great to see from Samsung. Samsung has historically let its devices be a little thicker than necessary to allow for removable batteries and battery doors, and using polycarbonate instead of metal like some of its sealed-in competition. Now, the S6 departs from the expandable storage and interchangeable batteries of yesteryear, and heads to the realm of quality materials and a sealed design for the phone. That normally wouldn’t cause any problems, especially because most of us don’t regularly take apart our smartphones, unless you’re a repair person, and that’s who this new sealed-in S6 will affect the most: the people that will have to get the thing open to fix it. A while back, we showed you that the glass back panel of the S6 could be removed for battery exchanges in the case of faults or depletion over time of ownership, but what if your screen has dead pixels, or your camera has physical defects, or perhaps one of the many sensors packed inside the latest Galaxy just suddenly stops working? Time to get it fixed or try to do it yourself.
The S6’s interior space is extremely well-managed by Samsung to allow for the best specifications while keeping the device as thin and small-footprinted as possible. But, with that choice of compact internal components comes the trouble of repairing it if something goes wrong and you don’t have a warranty or patience for Samsung Care’s attention. The message to gather, whether from what you’ve read thus far or from the video, which you should definitely check out to get a feel for what opening up and gutting the latest Galaxy actually looks like, is that the S6 is, like its various competitors, hard to repair simply because parts are small and not meant to be accessed by normal humans. Have you ever taken apart or repaired a device yourself? Which one, and what for? Do you think that this trend towards less user-repairable devices is a move towards simplicity for users, or benefit for the manufacturer?