The Non-Fixable Trend in Tablets

System repair is always a dicey situation in the PC world. On the one hand you have warranty agreements from OEMs that didn't want people meddling around under the covers. On the other hand, there is a healthy market of add-in boards and a thriving white box/build your own market for tech-savvy people who are quite capable of finding their way around the inteals of a PC.ONDA V812

Contrast that with the handheld devices - smartphones and other gadgets like the iPod - that are often sealed and virtually impossible to open. Some may allow you to replace a battery if you're lucky.

Tablets, the relative newcomers to the market, seem to be leaning in the direction of smartphones when it comes to openness. It's not surprising that the iPad is sealed and inaccessible; even Apple's latest MacBooks are sealed and won't allow the customer to change the laptop battery.

However, the industry is following in Apple's footsteps. ZDNet recently pointed out this growing trend of inaccessibility in tablets and some ultrabooks.

Microsoft's Surface Pro has become the poster child for this after a scathing teardown by iFixIt, the online repair site that does several device teardowns per month and found Surface Pro even less accessible than the iPad. The device had more than 90 screws and an absurd amount of glue.cheap android tablet

Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of iFixIt, criticized the trend of buying a whole new device when just the battery dies. "It's amazing how we've been brainwashed into accepting the notion that yes, it was expensive, but it was a year or two old, so let's get a new one," he said.

Most of the first five generations of iPods are likely unusable now because they have a dead battery, even though the rest of the device works fine. "But people just toss them away and say 'well, there's a new model, I'll get that'," he said.

The lack of replaceable batteries is his main complaint. Just like you change the tires on your car, you need to maintain your tablet. Any Lithium-ion battery will wear out, usually after 300 charges. If it's charged daily, that means you will use it up after a year.

When the battery dies, you can't even run off a power charger, Wiens notes. "This is a conce because you got schools replacing text books with iPads, but they always bought books on a seven-year purchase cycle. By the end of seven years, they figure the book is wo out and time to replacement. The argument for tablets is you save money on that replacement cycle, but now it looks like tablets have to be replaced a lot sooner than they have to be," he said.

He added that large institutions like govement are not happy with the lack of replaceable batteries, either. "They see it will be an expensive medium-term replacement, and it will increase the rate at which they replace hardware," said Wiens.

Thus far, the perspective of many manufacturers is to simply get a new device when the battery dies, he said. "Because tablets are new and sexy they are able to get away with it in ways they never could have with laptops," said Wiens.

But Van Baker, research director for consumer devices at Gartner, disagrees on the importance of changing batteries. "With the product lifecycle being as short as they are, competitively all manufacturers have to assume that lifecycles will tu fairly quickly. As a result you get to a point where as the owner of a device, you're three generations behind but your battery works fine and you are questioning whether you should buy the new device," he said.

Consumers aren't pretty motivated to upgrade with every release, but if you get three or more generations behind, you might upgrade just because of the advancements there.

"It's not about the battery it's about the features of the machine. Look at the cell phone market. The life span of a cell phone is 18 months. They certainly last longer, but people roll them over because people want the latest and greatest and I think that dynamic is part of the market," added Baker.