As anybody who’s cracked a phone’s screen and not had the money to get it fixed at the time will tell you, some phones are far, far easier to fix than others. Some may have insane amounts of different screws. Some may require you to carefully melt glue to get the glass off without heat-damaging the panel underneath. Whatever the issue, nobody would know about these sorts of things better than iFixIt. Responsible for the majority of major teardowns that hit the internet, they’ve laid hands on nearly every big-name device to come out in 2016, and have put together a nice little infographic showing how some of the bigger names stack up on repairability. Naturally, the infographic also includes the most and least repairable devices they ended up diving into throughout the year.
The LG G5 starts things off with a bang, achieving a more than passable repairability score of 8. Most of the components are modular, and things are nicely put together, with a removable battery to top it all off. Essentially, anybody with the right screwdriver set, somewhat steady hands, and knowledge of how to follow a tutorial or a video will be able to replace most any component on the phone. Google’s Pixel and Pixel XL came up close behind, with the only real complaint being that opening the phones without breaking the screen is difficult. The iPhone 7 finished up the rankings, with a pretty simple repair, aside from needing four different screwdrivers.
Samsung managed to nab two of the bottom spots, with the Galaxy Note 7 getting a repairability score of 4 due to being very hard to open, and the battery being harder to replace than it should be. The Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge got an even lower score of 3, making them the hardest phones that iFixIt messed with this year. Due to the phones’ heavy reliance on slabs of glass for their construction, and heavy amounts of glue that has to be melted in order to take the phones apart to any degree. This makes for a very pretty and solid design, but one that is extremely difficult to dismantle for repairs.
