Smartphones are getting harder to repair as internal components are getting smaller with each passing year. Moreover, some brands use glue and non-standard screws in the assembly process. Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S21 Ultra, is hard to repair, similar to last year’s Galaxy S20 Ultra.
We did a teardown of the Galaxy S21 Ultra and gave it a repairability score of 3/10. That score matches the Galaxy S20 Ultra’s repairability score but falls short of the vanilla Galaxy S21’s score of 4/10. The Galaxy S21 Ultra uses the same Phillips screws in all the important places, but it also uses a lot of glue behind the battery, display, and rear panel, making it harder to disassemble the device.