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Surface Pro: 'Virtually Unrepairable'
An anonymous reader writes with a link to an article at Wired with some harsh words for Microsoft's new tablet: "The Surface Pro is not a repair-friendly machine. In fact, it's one of the least repairable devices iFixit has seen: In a teardown of Microsoft's tablet-laptop hybrid, the company gave it a rock-bottom score of just one — one! — out of 10 for repairability, lower even than Apple's iPad and the Windows Surface RT."
I've spoken to people at my local TV repair shop, and they expect to be out of business soon. Modern hardware isn't repairable. Even replaceable components aren't: They cited the flyback transformer as an example. A frequent failure in CRT displays, and easily replaceable: A little soldering, but that's all. Except that the newer CRTs (before everything went flat) needed calibrating for the exact value of resistance and inductance of the flyback, to compensate for slight variences between individual components even off the production line, and those calibration values are stored in an EPROM chip which cannot be so easily replaced, in a propritary format for which the manufacturer never released any tools or documentation, accessible usually by entering a secret handshake known only by the manufacturer via either a hidden serial port or the IR control interface. The flyback may be replaceable, but it won't do you any good. It's easier to just buy a whole new TV than to reverse-engineer one enough to repair it.
They compare it to the iPad, which is pretty bad to repair... However, as a general purpose computer running a full OS, a fair comparison would also be the MacBook Pro Retina. ...1 out of 10 as well.
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-with-Retina-Display-Teardown/9462/
This is a bad trend with custom screws, glue and all sorts of crap.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
The problem is getting to the SSD. It took the folks at ifixit, professionals who do this kind of thing day-in-and-day-out, over an hour to even take the cover off to get to the inside of the machine. It required a heat gun and a tool to separate the black-tar-like adhesive. They said it was a new record on how long a device took them to gain access to it's insides.
Then you have to remove more than 50 screws to get to the underside of the main board to be able to remove the SSD.
As part of their removal process they said that the majority of people who decide to take apart their surface will likely break it because there are four cables that surround the inside perimeter of the display and that you will cut one of them unless you are extremely careful.
And even once you take it apart, you still have the challenge of putting it all back together again. Since you've now broken the adhesive that goes around the outside, you would then have to scrub it all off from the complete perimeter of the device, obtain new adhesive, and apply it again.
No... this is not a repair that 99.9% of people could conceivably perform in their own home.