Recently my iPad (5th gen) was dropped, and it had many cracks on its screen. After about a week of the glass being broken, I looked it up to see if I could order a replacement part to fix it and if it would be worth the price of a claim and the time to replace it. After a bit of googling around, I found out that I could just replace the glass part (the digitizer), and it would be much cheaper than replacing the whole LCD display.
A digitizer is where the screen recognizes touch, and is the outer glass part you interact with the actual LCD was not damaged. I was able to find a replacement part on a site called iFixit. I heard about iFixit from a YouTuber I watch called Hugh Jeffreys. Hugh Jeffreys is an Australian tech enthusiast who repairs devices such as Phones, Tablets, iMacs, etc., and makes short videos on the process. He and several other youtube creators also use iFixit tools for taking apart phones.
iFixit sells parts to many different kinds of devices mainly I was able to find a screen digitizer for my exact iPad model pretty quickly on their site. They also have a pretty active community on almost any device for help on taking apart and fixing. The part I ordered cost me about $50, including the tools necessary for taking apart the iPad.
After the part arrived, I looked at the guide in the item description. Unfourtintly I broke the home button ribbon cable when taking the front display off of the iPad. It was a painful process of heating the iPad adhesive with the heating tool, then attempting to pry it open, and then heating it again. Fourtintly I was able to find a home button replacement on iFixit as well, but that meant that the Touch ID would no longer work due to apple’s “safety concerns.”
After I applied for a screen protector after the completed repair, I bought it off amazon for about $8 for three. The entire repair cost about $70. It would have been cheaper if I hadn’t bought the home button replacement.
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