Wiens chimed in. "The screen is glued to the case. The battery is glued down. The logic board is really glued down. The headphone jack is glued in. The only good news is that the LCD is not fused to the front glass," he said.

When iFixit tore down Apple's 15-in. MacBook Pro with a Retina screen in June, Wiens called it and gave it a "1," the lowest-possible score in his site's repairability ratings, largely because of the amount of adhesive used to hold down components, particularly the battery.

Today, the iPad Mini did little better, garnering a "2" out of 10, and collecting the comment "repair [is] extremely difficult" from iFixit.

In comparison, two tablet rivals, Google's Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire HD, each earned a "7" on repairability from the site.

There weren't many surprises post-teardown, but Wiens pointed out a few.