iFixit gives its opinion on the MS Surface Book: don't try to fix it at home

the team of iFixit (in case you don't know it, it's a site that always dismantles computers and Gadgets to define the degree of maintenance difficulty) took advantage of the release - along with the hype created - to analyze the difficulty of maintaining/upgrading the Surface Book. Your grade? From 1 to 10, with 10 being the easiest possible, the new high performance notebook from ecosystem received grade 1, that is, the greatest difficulty possible!

A few things discovered by the team are worth mentioning:

• The SSD can be replaced, but the work to get to it is huge as it sits behind all the hardware on the machine, which is mounted face down!
• On the display there is a battery glued (which makes sense, after all you can detach it from the keyboard and it needs to keep working). It can be removed, despite being extremely glued to the display, making removal much more delicate.
• The base batteries are also interchangeable, but they are glued together with even more glue than the display battery.
• The screen is an assembly of a glass panel and the LCD display, making its replacement very complex and difficult.
• The processor and RAM are soldered to the motherboard.
• A very strong adhesive product is used in the assembly to hold almost all the components together, including even the base cover.
• Most components are on the back of their respective motherboards, which requires their complete removal to replace even the simplest parts.

Check out how the screen turned out Surface Book fully dismantled:

Not least, check out how the base of the Surface Book fully dismantled:

It is even more surprising the comment of the staff of the iFixit on disassembly: “The experience doesn't make the process any less stressful. The Surface line has come a long way, but we'd love to see an evolution in the opening process. Maybe something that doesn't threaten that shards of glass will go flying at the slightest misstep.”

What is most surprising is that this product comes from a company that, for a long time, had its name associated with customization, in the sense that it was difficult to buy a ready-to-use computer. The normal thing was that someone from the family or a technician – often – “trusted” would help in choosing the parts; motherboard, processor, RAM memory, hard disk, modem, multimedia kit and case. After everything was bought, that same person would ride. In the face and in the courage. These computers (so-called frankensteins) until they worked fine. O Windows which ended up taking the blame, as the system went crazy trying to deal with the diversity of parts and their respective drivers. Who hasn't spent hours trying to find a driver for a part of their pc that actually worked?

Now we see this computer, which follows an assembly line much more in the Apple , reaching the market ecosystem, which tries to reverse this decades-old image. It is easy to compare this product to Apple computers because of its hardware restriction., the difficulty of being opened or repaired. O Windows 10 help, a more rounded operating system and married to the hardware configuration. This may even be the decisive reason why the infamous blue screens start to disappear and be just a trauma for computer users of the past.

Will this new computer manufacturing model have an impact on sales, due to the degree of repair difficulty and the fact that the most important parts are soldered to the boards? Only time will tell. But we hope that this change will become a positive and competitive factor for the market. So, in the end, who wins is the user.