Teardown of the HTC One M9 streamlined design makes some parts more accessible, but battery is buried, and display would be very hard to repair
HTC One M9 Teardown — Teardown — Teardowns provide a look inside a device and should not be used as disassembly instructions. — Featured Guide
Context & Ripple Effects
iFixit's HTC One M9 teardown lands mid-arc in a run of 2015-2016 teardowns that turned internal design into a public scorecard: the same year brought the OnePlus 2 teardown, which found the battery removable fairly easily and the device more repairable than its predecessor.
For HTC specifically, the buried battery and hard-to-fix display read against the company's later trajectory — the relationships show HTC pivoting to VR hardware like the Vive Flow and Vive XR Elite while Google's own Pixel XL teardown still credited much of the component modularity in an HTC-built device.
First-order effects
- M9 owners and independent repair shops face a buried battery and a display iFixit flags as very hard to repair, making screen and battery replacements disproportionately costly relative to the parts themselves.
Second-order effects
- Rivals gain a marketing angle: OnePlus's easier-to-remove M9-era battery contrast gives value-flagship makers a concrete repairability talking point at HTC's expense, and buyers comparing flagships get one more axis beyond specs and price.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across this teardown run — Nexus 5X praised for independently replaceable modules, Pixel XL penalized for a fragile screen despite modular internals — repairability becomes a standardized, comparable metric that shapes how manufacturers weigh sealed designs against serviceable ones, with iFixit as the de facto scorer.
The trend: Teardowns are hardening into a standard consumer-facing measure of smartphone build decisions, pressuring manufacturers over the thinness-versus-serviceability trade-off.