New iPad Pro has a massive, hidden improvement, and it has to do with the battery

Our reports on teardowns of Apple’s iPads over the years read like a sad litany of complaints about poor repairability.

But now that iFixit’s specialists have torn apart the new, 13-inch iPad Pro 2024, we have some good news to report: The device’s battery is easily accessible immediately after you remove its display.

This makes it far easier to replace than in some earlier iPad variants, which required removing the logic board and other parts before you could access the battery.

Unfortunately, this is where the good news about repairing this thing ends. The new iPad Pro is Apple’s thinnest product ever, and it shows in the absence of screws. Instead, numerous parts are glued down, making the device thinner but also harder to repair. You can check out the details in iFixit’s teardown video below.

Suffice it to say, don’t even try to open this one if you aren’t an expert at repairing Apple gadgets.

Of course, the teardown is interesting as it gives you more insight into Apple’s new, tandem OLED display. (Hint: It isn’t actually two displays stacked on top of each other, but a more complex OLED stack with more electroluminescence layers). The teardown also reveals that Apple is using a single 256GB chip in the base model, which probably isn’t the fastest chip out there, but on a machine as overpowered as the new iPad Pro (read our review here), it probably doesn’t matter.

Apple’s new Pencil is also torn down in the video, and utterly destroyed in the process. Don’t try to repair this one either, folks.