iFixit tears down the Surface Pro, gives lowest score possible for repairability

By Mariella Moon Published February 15, 2013

ifixit_surface_pro — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Check out our full review of the Microsoft Surface Pro tablet.

Keep this in mind if you’re planning to buy Microsoft’s Surface Pro: if it ever breaks down, don’t open it up on your own unless you’re absolutely certain you know what you’re doing. iFixit, a website famous for dismantling electronics to show you their degree of repairability, recently had its way with the Surface Pro and gave the tablet-laptop hybrid a score of 1 out of 10. That’s the lowest possible iFixit score any device can get, which means trying to pry open a Surface Pro proves to be a hefty challenge.

Recommended Videos

iFixit had to remove over 90 screws to get the device open and then had to deal with a ton of adhesive that holds its components in place. The fused glass and LCD that make up the display were especially difficult to remove. “The display assembly of the Surface Pro is anchored down with the most adhesive we’ve ever seen on a small device,” a tweet on the iFixit Twitter account reads. Note that there are four wires surrounding the screen, and chances are you will damage them unless you’re very careful and do everything with perfect accuracy. Once the adhesive’s been taken care of, it’s easy to extract the device’s battery, as it’s not soldered to the motherboard. You could also remove the Surface Pro’s solid-state drive if you want, but the website warns that trying to open it might kill your device.

You can find a lot of “teardown” posts of popular electronics on the iFixit website, complete with details on how difficult or easy it is to remove each part of the device. Apple’s iPad with Retina display received a 2 out of 10 due to “gobs, gobs, and gobs of adhesive” holding everything in place. A high-profile product that’s on par with the Surface Pro in terms of repairability is the MacBook with Retina display that also got the lowest possible score due to its proprietary screws and SSD, its soldered RAM, and its fused display assembly.

Photo via iFixit

Former Contributor

Mariella loves working on both helpful and awe-inspiring science and technology stories. When she's not at her desk writing…

Topics

Computing

Qualcomm is set to ratchet up chip prices in September, and your next gadget upgrade could bear the brunt

The price hike could touch every Snapdragon-powered device category.

The new Qualcomm Snadragon 8 Elite Gen 5

I want you to sit with this for a second. Qualcomm, the company whose Snapdragon chips sit inside your Android phone and tablet, your Windows laptop, your Meta smart glasses, your Galaxy Watch, and your wireless earbuds, reportedly sent a letter to every major customer telling them prices are going up by double digits.

The price hike will be in effect from September 1, 2026, a recent Bloomberg report claims. Essentially, all the companies placing their chip orders after that will pay a higher price.

Computing

Stop fighting with your roomie over outlets and get one of these multi-port chargers before you head back to school

One plug, zero drama, all your devices charged by morning.

Satechi ChargeView

Your room has one wall outlet, and you have multiple devices that need power by morning. Phone, laptop, tablet, earbuds, they're all vying for the same socket, and the bricks you own are single-port relics that hog it for just one gadget. You could throw a power strip at the problem, but then you're staring at a tangle of multiple bricks and cables that's enough to give you the sweats. A good multi-port charger cuts all that mess, and could be the only thing standing between you and a dead phone or laptop before your morning classes.

Back-to-school season is a smart time to buy one. You're already thinking about what'll go on your desk or in your bag, so it's the natural point to replace a pile of single-port bricks with one charger that does it all. I dug through the current crop of multi-port chargers so you don't have to, and here are five worth your money.

Computing

OpenAI’s rogue AI hack was just the beginning, Hugging Face warns

OpenAI’s rogue AI has come back to bite it

Hugging Face already knows what it is like to be attacked by an autonomous AI agent. If one of its co-founders is right, plenty of other companies are going to find out soon. Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, has called the recent cyberattack carried out by OpenAI models a “wake-up call” for the technology industry.

Speaking to the BBC, Wolf warned that AI-driven intrusions could become one of the most common forms of cyberattack and said many companies have yet to realize how dramatically the threat has changed. This arrives after OpenAI disclosed that its models escaped a restricted cybersecurity evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face while trying to obtain answers for the ExploitGym benchmark. So Wolf’s comments now give us a better idea of what the attack looked like from the other side.