The Apple Watch was finally rolled out on Friday. However, it doesn’t appear to be nearly worth all the hype. Why? Well, it looks like the Apple Watch is nearly impossible to upgrade or repair, all but forcing you to buy a new watch to keep up with the latest advances. And apparently Apple wants it that way.
Kyle Wiens and his team at iFixit, the crowdsourced tech repair site, peered into the guts of an Apple Watch Sport, the cheapest model available at $349. They don’t like what they see so far. Removing the S1 processor–which Apple describes as “an entire computer architecture on a single chip”–took far longer than Wiens expected. iFixit indicated as much in one of its first tweets on the teardown of the Apple Watch.
The difficulty removing the S1 casts serious doubt on the ability to upgrade the Apple Watch. http://t.co/EmPBj4SYhP pic.twitter.com/wZPn6g0JgN
? iFixit (@iFixit) April 24, 2015
Wiens told The Independent, one of the major papers in the United Kingdom, that the S1 is “encased in resin,” and was hard to remove because “a mess of glue and soldered ribbon connectors” held it down. While the resin was intended to make the S1 last longer, it also negates any attempt to find replacement parts for the Apple Watch. While it’s relatively easy to remove the screen and battery, Apple decided to solder the peripheral cables onto the back of the S1, making it all but impossible to remove any other components. Don’t think about board-level repairs either.
iFixit gave the Apple Watch a score of 5 out of 10, with 10 being the easiest to repair. However, it looks like it would have scored lower than that if not for the easy removal of the screen and battery. Wiens said that the “overall device construction” makes the Apple Watch hard to repair. He thinks the Apple Watch has “planned obsolescence” built into it. Translation–as processors speed up, the only way you can run them on the Apple Watch is to buy a new one. The closest parallel is the iPhone; the latest versions of iOS only work on the newer models.
This is nothing new with Apple. For years, it has faced accusations that it deliberately makes its products hard to repair. But when you consider that the highest-end Apple Watch costs as much as $17,000–almost as much as a car– you would think that Apple wouldn’t try to force you to open up the wallet again so soon. Then again, we are talking about the company that botched the marketing of the Mac like a bad-hands wide receiver. So before you think about plunking down money for one of these snazzy smartwatches, consider that you may be heading back to get a replacement sooner than you may think. Not exactly a good investment.
