Ω Replacing the iPad 2's Digitizer: Not Too Hard, but Easy to Screw Up

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It was going well until the very, very end.

I had almost (yes, almost) successfully replaced my new-to-me iPad 2’s not-so-badly-cracked digitizer, a.k.a. “touchscreen.” I learned a few things along the way, which I present here for you to use at your own risk:

  • It is damned-near impossible to remove the first iPad 2 screen you ever remove without breaking something. What you are doing, after all, is removing a tightly-glued thin piece of glass from the remainder of the iPad by bending the rest of the iPad away from the glass to get it started. The best way to do this is to use a flat but very stiff (putty knife stiff) plastic tool about 1/2" wide. Heat the glue as directed elsewhere and then place the edge of the tool just inside the plastic rim around the screen. Push straight down hard and you’ll bend the aluminum away from the display glass just a smidgen—just enough to rotate the tool into the gap you opened up. Once you do that, follow instructions elsewhere to remove the display in one piece. Mine did not come off in one piece.

  • This tool might be ideal.

  • Use a shop towel to work on. They’re soft enough, but cheap enough to throw away because you’re never going to get all of those sticky little glass shards off it. Work for a while until you gum up one, throw it away, get another, and continue. You won’t scratch the back of your iPad this way.

  • Apparently, it’s really, really easy to damage the power button cable. My power button (sleep button?) doesn’t work now. That’s where the “almost” above comes from.

  • You’ll get dust in between the glass and the LCD. I did the job as perfectly as I could and I still had dust in the way. The solution is to use canned air (or whatever they’re passing off as air these days) and to leave a bit of the digitizer lifted before sealing it up. Stick the straw into the corner of the display and simply blow the dust into the far edge of the digitizer. If you think about it ahead of time, you can probably dust things off before assembly.

It was in the process of dusting the display from the inside as I mention above that I messed things up. Instead of keeping the can upright, I turned it upside down accidentally. Did you know that what’s in the can is not air, that it’s actually liquid? Yeah, I knew that too, and the resulting mess inside my iPad proved it to me. Now I have a huge smudge caused by the liquid—plus condensation! w00t!—in between the LCD and the digitizer.

To fix this problem, I’ve ordered new adhesive and a new power cable. I figure that the slightly less-than-optimal adhesion, plus my newly-found digitizer removal skillz may mean I won’t have to order a new digitizer. Worst case, I order another digitizer, which I can afford to do about (hmmm… borrow… carry the one…) six more times before I would have been better off taking the thing to Apple.

I’ll report back…

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