If you’re thinking on repairing your own Surface Book, think again, this new laptop from Microsoft is almost impossible to fix. The Surface Book is one of the most impressive piece of technology of the year, and the guys from iFixit have teardown the device to give us a clearer look at the components and to assess the difficulties to repair it.
After tearing it apart, the guys from iFixit came to a conclusion that you shouldn’t try to fix it yourself by giving a repairability score of 1 out of 10.
And here’s why:
- The display assembly has a fused glass panel and LCD, which is very difficult to remove and replace.
- The processor and memory are soldered to the motherboard — clearly they can’t be replaced.
- There are a lot of strong adhesive that holds many of the components in place, including the display, base core, and batteries.
- Microsoft put the motherboard face down too many components that are hard to see. You need to remove the motherboard to reach the components.
However, during the process of tearing down the Surface Book, we can learn a lot from the device. For example, the larger screen is more difficult to remove, there are a number of chipsets, ambient sensor, infrared emitter, privacy light indicator, microphone, camera, cooling fan, and even the SSD are similar to the Surface Pro 4.
Perhaps the most interesting thing was identifying the small Li-ion 18 Wh 7.5V 2387 mAh battery that is housed inside the display, which should power the Surface Book for about 3 hours.
Disassembling the keyboard base has a similar process as with the tablet part. After prying open the base, we can see that Microsoft is including a 51Wh 7.5V 6800 mAh battery, which supplies almost three times the battery life of the tablet portion.
Finally, the “dynamic fulcrum hinge” design is attached with screws to the base, which could be considered another replaceable component.
Above, you will find a few of the images for the disassembly process, but you can always visit iFixit for the entire teardown process. It’s worth pointing out that iFixit has chosen the Surface Book with Core i5, discrete graphics, 8GB of memory, and 128GB of storage model for the teardown.
After seeing the disassembly process, it’s clear that users should never try to fix the Surface Book. If you get the laptop, you will be better off getting the protection plan for $249, which provides cover for accidental damages, including drops and spills, and hardware defects or malfunction for two years.
If already bought a Surface Book, keep in mind that you have 45 days to get a protection plan since the day you bought the device.
Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 15 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 21 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me. Email him at [email protected].