A brand new Surface Pro 3 tablet has fallen into the hands of the iFixit repair team, and what do you think they did with it? As usual they took it apart, but what's unusual is that the engineers broke the display during disassembly, showing us the downsides of an ultra-thin device.
The Surface Pro 3 is held together with copious amounts of black sticky mastic and tape. This means that despite the fact that the tablet is kitted out with what could otherwise be a replaceable battery and mSATA flash drive, getting into the device to replace or upgrade these parts without causing mayhem and damage is unlikely given that the iFixit team — folks who spend their days opening devices — broke the screen getting into it.
That means the chances that you or I could make it inside this tablet are slim indeed. Now you might argue that few people bother to repair and upgrade their devices, and that's certainly true, but for people who care about such things, this is a problem.
Once inside the Surface Pro 3 the team discovered:
The iFixit team gave the Surface Pro 3 a repairability score of 1 out of 10 (a scale on which 10 represents the easiest to repair). Not only is removing the screen difficult (made harder by the fact the display assembly is made up of a fused glass panel and LCD), but the abundant use of adhesive along with non-standard connectors make disassembly fraught with risk.
"The Surface Pro 3 traded the 2's 90+ screws for some seriously hideous adhesive, and consolidated even more components into un-modular land," iFixit told ZDNet in an email.
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