I once knew someone who would drop every new phone they got into the toilet. Not right off the bat, of course. But as time marched on and years went by, the toilet slowly claimed its victims one by one.
An iPad is a little harder to lose in a toilet, and I haven’t yet heard the dreaded splash of expensive new technology hitting the can. But I’m not immune to dropping it on, say, the concrete sidewalk outside my home while removing my toddler from the car and trying to hold the tablet at the same time as a thrashing child.
There are a few ways you can handle a broken iPad, from having the tablet screen replaced at your local third-party retailer to DIY-ing it yourself — and plenty of ways to avoid it happening in the first place, if you’re the forward-thinking type.Â
According to technology insurer Asurion, 80% of tablets are dropped within the first two years of purchase. Mine made it all the way to just two months shy of the 10-year mark, probably because I did in fact stop using it for half a decade. But when my kids came along, I suddenly remembered my old first-gen iPad Air, and it came in handy as an airplane entertainment-style screen for them in the car.Â
You’d think that would be fairly risk free. It’s securely attached to a seat back, after all. But the catch is when the tablet runs out of battery and has to be brought inside to be charged. It’s like playing a game of “the floor is lava,” except the hot, Californian concrete truly does mean death to all screens that meet it.
Tablet ownership is also far more common if you have children, according to the US Census Bureau, which said four out of five households with children owned tablets in 2021. From my direct experience of living with two tiny humans who have zero regard for the laws of gravity, and even less for the delicacy of expensive gadgets, I’m willing to bet that houses with children in them are also far more likely to break the tablets they do have.
So what do you do when your kid or, to be…
Read the full article here