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You Can't Open the Microsoft Surface Laptop Without Literally Destroying It (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Microsoft's latest Surface Laptop may have earned glowing reviews from certain sections of the tech press, but don't tell that to iFixit. The company, which provides repair tools and manuals for popular gadgets like the iPhone and PlayStation, has handed the Surface Laptop a score of 0 out of 10 in terms of user repairability, stating definitively that the laptop "is not meant to be opened or repaired; you can't get inside without inflicting a lot of damage." iFixit's detailed teardown illustrates just how difficult it is to open the Surface. For starters, there are no screws, proprietary or otherwise, on the outside of the laptop. Instead, the laptop is literally welded together using a type of "plastic soldering" that is rare to see in consumer electronics. Anyone hoping to get inside the "beautifully designed and crafted" computer will have to pry it open with a knife or dedicated pick in order to defeat Microsoft's plastic welding. Whether or not it's actually worth going through the trouble of defeating said welding is another matter, given that the "glue-filled monstrosity," as iFixit dubs the laptop, has none of the user-upgradeable parts you'd want to see in a PC, like memory or storage.
"It literally can't be opened without destroying it," the repair company concludes. "If we could give it a -1 out of 10, we would," iFixit said in an emailed statement on Friday. "It's a Russian nesting doll from hell with everything hidden under adhesive and plastic spot welds. It is physically impossible to nondestructively open this device."
"It literally can't be opened without destroying it," the repair company concludes. "If we could give it a -1 out of 10, we would," iFixit said in an emailed statement on Friday. "It's a Russian nesting doll from hell with everything hidden under adhesive and plastic spot welds. It is physically impossible to nondestructively open this device."
stop shitposting bitch im a marine if i ever meet you ill beet your fucking ass
Bestbuy offers the i7, 16g, 512GB SSD for $2199.
Assuming the battery will last 2 years, that's 91.62/mo. with no extras or failures.
That's 200 soft tacos, or 5 cases of cheap beer. Every month, for 2 years.
I've owned a few surfaces so far. Handy tablets for taking a shit, but the AC adapters are all so horribly designed that they fail within a month or 2. A few warranted replacements before that expired. I eventually went with the cheapo Chinese off brand and its solid and 10% the price.
Within 6 months the magnetic keyboard attachment point for the expensive keyboard stopped working 9 out of 10 times it was attached, and it began missing keys. I never use it anyway, so never got it fixed.
Pro 2 had the exact same problems as the 1, AND the internal SSD went shithouse RIGHT after the warranty expired.
I'll never buy another Surface. They require repairs that simply cannot be done.
But like a I said, great for taking a shit.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I wouldn't. My reaction to this would be no different if Apple did it: I won't buy it, and I'll recommend against others buying it.
Right to Repair is not about making sure devices can be disassembled. It's about ensuring that parts are available and that replacing the parts doesn't cause some lockout. There's nothing in the arguments saying that a device needs to be repairable without an ultrasonic spotwelder or without a BGA reflow oven to remove parts.
No one really has complained much about Apple either except for that issue with the error caused by swapping out the TouchID controller.
Right to Repair != Ability to upgrade components. We bitch about the latter a lot.