3 
1 Do you differentiate between Very Easy, Easy & Moderate difficulties?
It's not a big problem but guide difficulties are very often mistaken, with Very Easy, Easy and Moderate being used interchangeably, especially when it comes to removing plastic rear cases (which influences the rated difficulty of removable battery replacements).
Official iFixit explanations:
Moderate — Requires some disassembly, additional tools, and basic repair knowledge.
Easy —Requires minimal disassembly, requires only Phillips or flat-head screwdriver.
Very Easy — Does not require opening device.
Compare battery replacements, including opening the rear case:
Fairphone 1 (rated Very Easy),
Fairphone 2 (rated ***Moderate***),
Fairphone 3 (rated Very Easy),
Galaxy S5 (rated Very Easy)
Galaxy S4 (rated Very Easy)
How hard is it in reality and what happened to Easy, which is different from Very Easy?
Should we be paying more attention to guide difficulties and edit old guides?
Is this a worthwhile discussion?
1 
3 Comments
@amber any additional thoughts?
by Nick
Oh, I'm sure. I tend to be quite opinionated. ^_^
My off-the-cuff thoughts are that @krzeszny is right. There is a wide variety between guide difficulties and it probably needs to be evaluated in some way.
I'll talk this over with @krisrodriguez and get back to everyone next week sometime (hopefully by Wednesday.)
by Amber Taus
@amber The reason I opened that laptop up part way is to show what I consider a reasonable thing to conservatively rate. Like it's the thing most of us can work on and write guides for, but we need to remember not everyone has the experience of working on them like I do, for example. I've changed drives a lot in Dells as well (and made stupid hacks like taping a laptop drive to a Dim 5150 caddy work), so that took me all of 5 minutes to take apart to show.
By the way, I never got a hard drive with it. It's previous corporate owners removed it before it was sold off, probably years ago.
The way I approach it when I overestimate the difficulty is if it's something I can do in 5 minutes like it's nothing, then I will probably rate it a "Moderate 30 minute" guide, possibly a range like "Moderate 20-30 minute". The goal is not scare people off, it's to cover against self-induced error though bad estimates. Now if I'm off a bit and say, a few novices get it right within the times I get it right I reduce it to something like "Easy 30 minutes" for the same reason as above - go over on time to cover yourself against skill variation. If it's something say, my dad would have to hand off to me to do for example I may stand my ground on the high estimate. I use that as my benchmark because that's most people who come here, so it's reliable.
There will always be one-off exceptions there as well sure (like swapping an Optane module for NVMe storage or the hard drive in an Inspiron 3671 which are DIY friendly, like the hard drives (NVMe on board, hard drive requires chassis flip to reveal the screws). That said, while I consider those "new DIY friendly", you may need a hand in knowing where to look for the 3.5" screws, and my approach accounts for that.
I don't have the luxury of the EDU program where they can test it and be more correct. My defense is conservative difficulty and time ratings, and if anyone asks, I'll tell them what I said here.
by Nick