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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."
... waste!!! Manufacturers just want you to buy another to replace yours which is designed to break soon. Manufacturers win with more diversion of economy (e.g. repeat sales). World loses.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
well, you fucked that up, I can only hope your love life is better
"It simply is not designed to be opened or fixed at home, except perhaps by teardown expert"
Hasn't that generally been the case for a few decades now, for lots and lots of things? They are basically bitching that there are lot of screws and glue. It's not a simple device.
OK, not really.
For starters, I can't imagine it being easy to make a tablet you can open up and make changes to.
And then every manufacturer would rather you replace the device when it breaks or needs upgrading. And if they can get you locked into their software, even better.
Companies don't really care about consumers rights, and they never will. They're only in it to make profit -- I don't care who the vendor is, they'll all do it.
Microsoft, Apple, and even Google since they're trying to drive everything you do to the things that make them money and make sure you have to keep buying their stuff.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches."
-Aldous Huxley
Of course a consumer society isn't supposed to have anything that can be repaired by a normal human being. If you want anything, you're supposed to cough up your hard-earned cash to your corporate overlords.
I am officially gone from
Really guys, the summary is copied from the first paragraph on the wired article, which has the link to the iFixt teardown, was it that difficult to keep the link? http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+Teardown/12842/
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
Sadly more and more devices are like this now. Apple seem to have popularised it and made is acceptable and other companies seem to be continuing the trend.
Microsoft's tablet is unrepairable BUT IT'S ALL APPLE'S FAULT!!!
Get used to it, been that way since Genesis.
There's a direct trade-off between thinness/weight and repairability. As it stands the device is already being heavily criticized for being just 0.5" thick and weighing 2 lbs. To get it even at that point, apparently glue had to be used in place of a lot of fasteners that make repairing easy. Now I expect we'll see the same people criticizing it for weight/thickness also criticizing it for not having a removable battery, hard drive, and memory, all of which add weight/thickness. Dell's Latitude 10 comes in fixed and removable battery configurations, the later weighs 0.04 lbs more. Keep in mind while it's not much, the margin between Surface and its closet competitors like iPad are 0.1" thickness and 0.5 lbs, so every bit counts.
So like everything there's a choice. Do you want a core i5 processor or do you want a long battery life? Do you want a super thin machine, or do you want an easy to repair machine?
Get used to it, been that way since Genesis.
Leave Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins out of this!
Nuh uh! All 10 surface pro buyers are furious!
No USER serviceable parts is a far cry from NO REPAIRS POSSIBLE AT ALL.
A: someone can repair it.
versus
B: NO ONE can repair it.
BIG DIFFERENCE
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Xbox is red, Windows is blue, And Microsoft's tablet is full of glue!
Hardware manufacturers have been trying to kill off the repair business for the same reason video game makers are trying to kill off the used game market - every dollar you spend fixing something you already own, is a dollar they don't get.
What blows my mind are the hypocrites here on /. who will wail endlessly about EA and Sony locking a game disk to a particular console (i.e., something that really doesn't matter in the 'big scheme of things'), then subsequently accuse people who complain about hardware makers doing the exact same thing of being "buggy whip makers," even though the trend of planned obsolescence in hardware is far more dangerous to society than anything having to do with a stupid fucking video game.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
And it is high time someone pointed out how stupid that is.
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.
I'm not exactly sure what is supposed to be special about Surface, but people only appear to dance with them. I could see a lot of screens getting broken.
I could feel this trend coming in the air tonight.
There are a lot of responses here that say "All tablets are like that".
First, Many of those tablets cost $200 (Nexus). It is a lot more acceptable to have a sealed $200 device than a sealed $1000 device, regardless of form factor.
Second, Almost no other computing device is sealed to this extent with an inch wide strip of tar like adhesive that needs a heat-gun to pry apart (who knows how well it will go back together). I take nearly everything apart, but I would mess with this kind of extreme adhesive job, especially on a $1000 device.
Third. It isn't even about repairs. If this was pure reliable solid state, it wouldn't be a big deal, those parts could run for decades. But this has two fans, meaning they will accumulate dust/have bearing failures, and in few years need replacing/cleaning, it has batteries with short finite life that will fail in few years, the SSD is small size and has an OS with propensity to write a lot to it (swap files) etc, and has a significant chance of failure. These should be considered serviceable components, because chances are significant that one or more of them will need service in a few years. Having them sealed, non-serviceable in $1000 device is unacceptable (IMO).
It's also worth mentioning that "No User Serviceable Parts Inside" is frequently code for 'There's AC power at local grid voltage and/or a beefy inverter in here, don't fuck with this unless you know enough to know that this warning isn't meant for you'.
It's much less common to see the warning on devices powered by external DC supplies, especially now that cold cathode backlights seem to be giving way to LEDs. Such devices are frequently less likely to actually be user-serviceable in any useful way(given that AC PSUs are, by necessity, frequently built from pretty chunky components that you don't even need sharp eyes to rework, while low-voltage DC gear seems to get smaller every year); but that specific phrase mostly seems to show up when there is a shocking surprise available inside.
We all understand that Apple has convinced people they always have to have the most shiny new thing, and so batteries don't have time to wear out.
For the rest of us, though, many parts of devices need replaced (batteries, cables, cases, etc.) long before the useful life of the device is up.
Nuh uh! All 10 surface pro buyers are furious!
I was confused until I realized you were using binary. Good one!
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Nobody repairs tablets.
Historically this is true. The makers of the Rosetta Stone knew this would be the case, so they introduced redundancy so we could still retrieve the information even of part of the tablet broke. They wrote everything three times! From what I understand, the Surface Pro is stuffed with lots of redundant code for the same reason.
I'm teaching my kid how to count binary on his fingers. The number 4 is bad!
A sealed case isn't a huge deal in the case of the iPad or decent Android tablets, since there are no moving parts, no particularly hot-running components, and a top quality battery that should last for several years.
But the Surface Pro isn't like that. It's a notebook, complete with full OS, SSD, fans, and a powerful CPU, crammed into a tablet form factor.
What happens when that SSD starts failing from the heavy IO load of desktop software? Or one of the fans blows a bearing?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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!
"What happens when that SSD starts failing from the heavy IO load of desktop software? Or one of the fans blows a bearing?"
you throw it away and buy a new one.
Do you think microsoft expects anything else?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"What happens when that SSD starts failing from the heavy IO load of desktop software? Or one of the fans blows a bearing?"
you throw it away and buy a new one.
Do you think microsoft expects anything else?
Yes. I expect them to tell me that I have to buy all new software as well.
132 is even worse.
I'm not exactly sure what is supposed to be special about Surface, but people only appear to dance with them. I could see a lot of screens getting broken.
The thing i got out of those commercials was how much the screen was smudged. You are shooting a commercial and you can't clean the smudge prints of the screen? Seriously? Why do I want a laptop that is dirty? Bad enough a cell phone screen gets smudged up, but dang, a laptop (yes, I know they are tablets, but lets be real, with the fucking keyboard cover, it's a laptop. With finger smudges all over the screen.)
Be seeing you...
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.
Expect Microsoft to make it much easier to get at the SSD in future revisions. Not for the benefit of customers, for the benefit of their repairs department.
Apple made the same mistake years ago with their laptops. You had to remove the motherboard just to replace the HDD, and the HDD was the part most likely to fail. Later models made the HDD much easier to get at, along with RAM and the power socket (until it was replaced by magsafe).
The Surface Pro is too expensive to just throw away, MS will want to fix them to cover warranty claims (which are a minimum of 2 years in Europe).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC