iFixit: New $329 iPad is a throwback to the original iPad Air

Apple's $329 iPad, officially dubbed the iPad (5th generation), is a lot like the iPhone SE insofar as Apple is revisiting a design from 2013, putting more modern components in it, and selling it for a relatively low price. We already knew from the size, weight, and other specs that the iPad 5 was going to be a lot like the original iPad Air, and a teardown from iFixit reveals just how similar the tablets are inside and out.

For starters, the glass on the front of the tablet and the LCD panel aren't fused together as they are in the iPad Air 2 or either of the Pros. This makes it possible to replace either the glass or the LCD without having to replace both, which can make some kinds of repairs cheaper to do (laminated screens make for thinner devices, though, and they can also improve contrast and make colors seem more vivid). This is still an iPad, though, and Apple's tablets (for whatever reason) remain more difficult to fix than its phones—the battery is held in with a lot of glue, and opening the tablet up in the first place is going to require a heating pad to soften the glue holding the glass and the aluminum base together.

Once opened, the two tablets look substantially identical. The iPad 5 has a faster A9 SoC and 2GB of RAM to enable the multitasking features Apple added to the iPad in iOS 9, but their internal layouts are the same, and they use the same 32.9WHr battery. iFixit also found that the digitizer and LCD for the iPad 5 use the same connector as the ones in the original Air, and that the same timing controller is used for both displays. Just as iPhone 5S screens can be used to repair the iPhone SE, it seems like iPad Air screens could be compatible with the iPad 5.

There are just a couple points of departure. First, obviously, Touch ID and Apple Pay are available on the iPad 5 and not the original Air. And the mute switch, available on the iPad Air but removed in the iPad Air 2, has also been removed from the iPad 5.

The fifth-generation iPad earns itself a 2 out of 10 on iFixit's sometimes-arbitrary repairability score scale. The original iPad Air, the iPad Air 2, and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro all earn the same score, despite the fact that the latter two have the laminated displays that iFixit always complains about.

We'll be posting a full review of the $329 iPad 5 sometime next week.

Listing image by iFixit