iPad Battery Swap Woes

As briefly mentioned in the Nov 6 post, it was time to replace the dying battery in my iPad. Apple does not do that. I mean, they do, but instead of replacing the battery they sell you a new iPad (the same model and configuration) and you give them the old one. This is clearly because of the super low "repairability" score mostly due to the "Gobs of adhesive hold most everything in place, making all repairs more difficult.".

A local non-Apple-authorized service shop offered the battery replacement so I was eager to accept this offer. It took them a week after which they returned me the device with a new battery but broken WiFi (and Bluetooth). There was clearly something wrong with the 2.4GHz antenna, as WiFi reception was bad and Bluetooth was choppy. I returned them the device, they kept if for another week and returned in the same state - broken WiFi. Clearly they did not have skills nor testing tools / procedures to to fix what they broke. And I was afraid the iPad will not survive yet another disassembly operation - ungluing and regluing. So I turned back to Apple and opted for the whole device replacement.

Swapping the whole device is a hassle. I already went through this in the past as the screen broke when I dropped it on the floor. The hassle is with bringing it back to "where it was". Yes there is the iCloud backup, but it only partially works. After the restore operation there are tons of things you have to go through. 

In my case these required manually restoring or reactivating the following applications:

• updating the iOS (the new unit had an old one installed)
• restoring manually the WiFi networks used later to restore the device
• restoring Bluetooth pairings (the new unit has a different Bluetooth address so is not recognized by the paired devices)
• restoring the e-sim cellular networks (Apple is explicit about not being able to back this information up)
• reactivating the Revolut banking account (2 attempts as "something went wrong")
• reactivating the mBank -banking app (required a call the bank hotline and waiting for the agent)
• reactivating the Google Authenticator
• reinstalling and re-synchronizing the GMail accounts
• manually re-downloading the Audible books
• manually re-downloading the Spotify offline media
• manually re-downloading the YouTube offline media
• reinstalling and re-activating the government mObywatel app

I'm mostly a Windows / Android person and both platforms require significant effort to fully restore a device. I had been under the impression Apple was doing this better. Much better. Especially with the iCloud concept, for which I pay monthly just to have the device backed up.

One case to defend Apple may be the Adobe Lightroom app. It restored fully including all offline photos. So maybe the painful / not complete restore problem is on the application level? But if so, this should be the AppStore requirement. If this requires enforcement, Apple should do it.

Apple fanboys will probably point out I should have been using Time Machine or sth similar, but hey, this is 2022 and offline backups are not the option. You are not going to plug your machine to the local network everyday to back up 1TB worth of data. I simply do not understand why it is impossible to have a full (user-encrypted) image of the device stored in the cloud. 

And the bottom line is - batteries must be swappable.