14 DAY TRIAL // One of the highlights of the Surface Laptop 3, in addition to the introduction of a 15-inch version, is the significantly improved repairability, which Microsoft’s hardware chief Panos Panay himself demonstrated during the device’s official unveiling.
And according to the experts over at iFixit, Microsoft has indeed made substantial progress in this area, as right now, pretty much anyone should be able to open up the Surface Laptop.
According to a teardown iFixit published this week, breaking the device open only comes down to four Torx Plus screws which provide easy access to the most important internals.
In other words, using nothing more than basic tools, you should be able to pry off the Surface Laptop 3 case and get access to some of the parts that you might actually be interested in.
Difficult to replace parts
But the good part of this story ends here because, as it turns out, only the SSD can be replaced, as both the processor and the RAM are soldered to the motherboard. A storage upgrade is nice anyway, but other than that, there’s really not that much you can improve in terms of hardware on the Surface Laptop 3.
The battery is glued-down, and iFixit says it’ll be “very difficult” to service or replace.
“Display access is well-prioritized, but must be replaced as an (expensive) complete unit—subcomponents aren't modular. While many components are modular, intricate layered construction makes them difficult to service,” iFixit says in the teardown (you can watch them opening up the Surface Laptop 3 in the video embedded at the end of the article).
In the end, the new Surface Laptop 3 received a repairability score of 5 out of 10, which is a huge, huge upgrade from the zero points that the first-generation model received when it launched.
