We recently witnessed the teardown experts over at iFixit give Apple’s new MacBooks very poor 1/10 scores for ‘repairability’, but Microsoft has gone one worse than that, with its new Surface Laptop being marked 0/10 in terms of how friendly it is – or rather isn’t – to repair.
In fact, things are that bad with Microsoft’s new notebook, iFixit said that “if we could give it a -1 out of 10, we would”. Harsh stuff, indeed.
Much like the new MacBooks, one of the reasons the Surface Laptop fares so badly is the heavy use of glue in the machine – iFixit describes it as a “glue-filled monstrosity”, in fact.
And also as with Apple’s notebooks, the main components – processor, memory, storage – are all soldered to the motherboard. And indeed it’s a hell of a task to even open the Surface Laptop, with the teardown experts saying that the notebook can’t actually be opened without ‘destroying’ it, more or less.
- These are the best laptops for students to buy right now
Battery blues
They further concluded that the battery is difficult, and moreover dangerous, to replace – it took no less than 10 steps to remove – and that this is an all-round terrible machine for anybody who wants to repair the thing. And needless to say, you can forget about upgrades.
So while this notebook may well be a very smart-looking piece of hardware externally, that beauty is only skin deep, and if you literally delve beneath the Surface, things go distinctly pear-shaped.
Traditionally, Microsoft’s hybrids have never fared particularly well when it comes to iFixit’s repairability ratings, but sinking below the MacBook and hitting a big fat zero is clearly a new low.
It’s a shame that at least a little more thought doesn’t go into the internal design of modern laptops like these, but if they’re not really made to be opened at all, as is the case here, and tinkering or upgrading is not a concern, it’s hardly surprising to see. The ‘if it breaks, buy a new one’ philosophy doesn’t exactly hurt sales figures, either.
As we saw last week, the Surface Laptop (and new Surface Pro) are now available to buy.
Via: Guru of 3D
- Should you buy a Chromebook instead?
