iFixit is a company that is known for their Teardowns where they strip away a device down to its various internals for people to see. it has been a clever way for them to sell their myriad of tools since they use them to pry open these devices.
They usually pry open popular devices like smartphones and recently they did a tear-down of the Galaxy Fold.
Samsung’s new foldable smartphone has been plagued by problems that were shown by reviewers recently. The Galaxy Fold displayed various display problems and Samsung decided to suspend its imminent launch to a further date.
Today, iFixit decided to remove their tear-down of the Galaxy Fold and this decision was startling at least since this is probably the first time we have seen them doing this.
“We were provided our Galaxy Fold unity by a trusted partner. Samsung has requested though that partner, that iFixit remove its teardown,” they explained in the post.
“We are under no obligation to remove our analysis, legal or otherwise,” they further explained. “But out of respect for this partner, whom we consider an ally in making devices more repairable, we are choosing to withdraw our story until we can purchase a Galaxy Fold at retail.”
This explanation would make people come up with a number of reasons. Maybe the teardown was pretty good evidence of the Galaxy Fold’s shortcomings. Maybe Samsung had a contract with the ‘supplier’ where tearing down a phone was a breach of it. It could be a number of reasons that we would never know.
Although iFixit has since taken down the Galaxy Fold teardown, you can still read it thanks to Web Archive’s useful snapshots of the website. iFixit had found the Galaxy Fold to be difficult to repair (a score of 2/10) where the main faults included the fold mechanics could wear over time, lack of protection of the main display could be a pricey repair and difficulty in starting repairs due to the glued front and back glass.
