Galaxy S21 Ultra teardown shows that it’s not as hard to repair as you thought

Damien Wilde | Jan 22 2021 - 2:37 am PT

After the first teardown of the entry-level model in the series, the first video dismantling the Galaxy S21 Ultra has dropped showcasing just how difficult it is to repair.

YouTuber and teardown expert PBKreviews has taken the European Exynos 2100 Galaxy S21 Ultra to task, and allowed us to gaze upon its shiny innards. As you’d expect, it’s hard to repair, but not quite as hard as some of the other flagship devices.

The core differences here will be the lack of mmWave 5G antennae, which will be found in the the North American S21 Ultra. Display repairs are likely to be as expensive as ever though, with a heat gun needed to remove the copious amounts of adhesive pinning much of the internal components together neatly.

Whereas the polycarbonate backplate of the standard S21 will likely be cheap to replace, we’d imagine the Galaxy S21 Ultra will cost a pretty penny to replace and/or repair. You might remember that the standard S21 came with some foam balls within the internal speakers to help improve the sound, but curiously they are not present in the S21 Ultra. It’s not clear why either.

Most of the “core” internals are held in place with ribbon cables and standard screw mounts, which can simply be snapped out and then replaced as necessary. However, Samsung may not allow certain parts to be replaced with third-party repair firms.

After a full teardown, the Galaxy S21 Ultra is awarded a 6/10 repairability score — compared to the 7.5/10 awarded to the Galaxy S21. That’s not as bad as you might have expected, but taking apart your brand-new device without any prior knowledge of the inner workings is not something we’d suggest unless you know your way around.