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Apple Pencil Almost Impossible to Repair, Finds iFixit Teardown

Apple Pencil Almost Impossible to Repair, Finds iFixit Teardown

By Manish Singh | Updated: 8 December 2015 16:47 IST

Earlier this month, iFixit, which is popular for product teardowns and DIY fix-it guides, found that Apple's recently launched iPad Pro is one of the most difficult to repair devices available on the market. Turns out, its accessory the Apple Pencil is even tougher to fix.

The iFixit team cracked open the Apple Pencil, a stylus accessory designed to work with the iPad Pro, to find that it is extremely difficult to open, and the components inside are "impossible to remove without shredding."

Once the outer plastic case has been opened, there is an inner housing made of metal. Inside it is a lithium-ion battery of rating 3.82V, 0.329Wh, offering just five percent of the charge compared to the battery on iPhone 6s. The battery is apparently impossible to replace.

There's also a pressure sensor and a tiny logic board inside the Apple Pencil. The board, which the team says is the smallest it has seen in any device, weighs just a gram. The company has actually folded the board to fit it inside the Pencil.

The logic board sports an ARM-based Cortex-M3 MCU chipset and Bluetooth Smart radio. In the tip, there are two emitters that sense the angle and orientation in which the device has been kept. The team also found two moving parts that are there to gauge pressure.

iFixit found the $99-priced device very difficult to repair. It gave it a repairability score of one out of ten. "The pencil is clearly not meant to be opened or repaired; you can't get inside without destroying the device," it concluded. For comparison, the iPad Pro scored a repairability score of three out of ten.

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