If you want to know what’s inside one of Microsoft’s new Surface Pro 2 tablets, iFixit has published its teardown of the device. As ever, iFixit’s pictures give a nice look at what’s inside the machine, identifying all the major chips integrated onto its motherboard. There’s a lot packed into the svelte system.
The teardown also shows just how the device is put together, with a combination of both gluing and screwing. iFixit counted more than 90 screws. Just getting the thing open required unscrewing 52 screws of assorted sizes. This abundance of fasteners, combined with the use of glue, prompted the company to award the device with a repairability score of just one out of ten.
This seems bad, but it’s also essentially meaningless. It’s true that Surface Pro 2 isn’t particularly user serviceable. But that’s not because of glue and screws. It’s because it’s a highly integrated device, built using custom parts that aren’t available off the shelf.
The screen, for example, is a bonded 10.6-inch unit, with the touch sensor glued to the LCD. This construction eliminates the air gap found in unbonded devices, improving contrast and reducing reflections. If your screen is cracked, you can\’t just pick up a new display at Best Buy and swap it out yourself. They don’t sell ’em. It’s true that the bonded unit precludes a hypothetical independent replacement of the touch sensor and LCD, but that\’s not something that end users could ever do anyway.
Similarly, the motherboard is a custom design, shaped specifically for the Surface Pro 2. Even if the thing could be removed with nothing more than a single thumbscrew, it would be functionally irreparable, because you can’t just go out and buy a new one. The same is true of the CPU on the motherboard. It’s soldered, because that’s how Intel sells its ultraportable CPUs. That precludes any kind of trivial field replacement.
There are only two parts of the Surface Pro 2 that have any kind of reasonable claim to user servicing: the SSD and the RAM. In principle, both SSDs and RAM can be supplied as commodity components with easy retail availability. In practice, they frequently aren’t, as the quest for compactness tends to favor soldering instead of socketing. The Surface Pro 2 is fifty-fifty here. The SSD uses mSATA; the RAM is soldered.
It’s not impossible that somehow Microsoft could have made the SSD easier to get at or even used socketed RAM, too, but it’s not easy to see how this could have been done without also compromising the size, the weight, or both, of the device. The payoff for both Redmond and end users alike is unlikely to justify the decision. The integration used in the Surface Pro 2 is not arbitrary: it’s an essential characteristic of the form factor. Don’t like it? Buy a desktop.
On top of all this, Microsoft can, in fact, repair Surface devices. Crack the screen, and, yes, the company might just replace it when you take it into a store. But that\’s because it\’s a better experience (as the replacement is instant). The devices can be, and are, repaired. Microsoft has facilities to do this, and while getting into a Surface Pro 2 may be daunting for someone who doesn’t know how, that’s largely immaterial when there is staff trained in what to do.
via New Surfaces once again meaninglessly dissed for low repairability | Ars Technica.