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

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. 

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