14 DAY TRIAL // If you’re thinking of breaking open a Samsung Galaxy S10, you better stop dreaming, because the experts at iFixit have just tested the device and their conclusion isn’t by any means good news.
The Galaxy S10 received a repairability score of just 3 points out of a maximum of 10, and it’s mainly because of the amount of adhesive that Samsung used to keep everything in place.
Basically, dismantling a Galaxy S10 should be such a difficult thing to do because a single Phillips driver takes care of all the screws. But on the other hand, the simple fact that the glass front and back is glued-down with a ton of adhesive means there’s a good chance the body could break into pieces when trying to remove it.
USB-C port soldered to the motherboard
The area that’s mostly impacted by this is the screen, as iFixit notes that repairing the display requires a lot of effort due to tough adhesive.
The teardown also reveals that Samsung focused a lot more on preventing overheating, so it used various approaches to make sure all the heat is eliminated quickly.
“We peel off an additional, multi-layer piece of thermal interface material from the board. All that copper makes a great, big, flat surface, for better thermal transfer—but it's soft metal, so you need this soft interface to fill in any gaps that might otherwise kill performance or overheat your phone,” iFixit explains.
What’s also worth knowing is that Samsung has apparently given up on the modular, replaceable USB-C port, as the company now soldered this connected to the motherboard.
In other words, repairing a broken charging port is much more difficult now, and most likely, Samsung would just replace the entire motherboard should you bring the device to the service.
