14 DAY TRIAL // The Surface Book is Microsoft’s first laptop in history, and the company really struggled to do it right, trying to offer the best hardware you can get at the moment.
But fitting all these components in such a thin case was clearly a challenge, and a recent teardown made by iFixit provides us with a closer look at how the desktop looks on the inside.
Basically, if you ever think that you can repair the Surface Book yourself, you are absolutely wrong. The chances are that not even Microsoft can do that, so if something breaks down, if the company’s engineers can’t get to it without removing all internals, they might very well offer you a new laptop.
So much glue
Although it’s a challenge to replace a simple part such as an SSD in a Surface Book, it’s hard to blame Microsoft for going for such a complex approach. The company had to fit all those high-performance parts in a small case, so instead of using screws for all of them, it turned to glue to hold them in place.
Then, there’s the upgradeability part. Although it doesn’t say it clearly, Microsoft (and the other companies out there making similar devices) has no reason to let you easily replace a specific part of your device because, this way, you’d never buy premium support or repair services.
Not to mention that replacing an SSD, for instance, inside a Surface Book with another one with bigger capacity basically means that you can purchase a lower-end laptop that’s more affordable and then upgrade it on your own. So the top-of-the-range model would sell in lower numbers, which isn’t actually what Microsoft wants for its laptop.
As you can see in the photos in the gallery after the jump, it takes more than just a few hours and super skills to remove the motherboard, so if you ever consider doing a teardown on your own, just don’t. The chances are that you’ll never get it working again.
