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Microsoft Surface Pro Teardown

ifixit.com

72 pointsdan123434 comments

> We don't understand the point of heavily-glued batteries. This kind of planned obsolesce is completely unnecessary.

I dropped my iPhone 5 on a tile floor recently. Looked fine apart from a small scuff on the bevel, but the home button wasn't working. Desperately hoping it was a software problem, I powered off the phone— and then noticed that not only was it not a software problem, but the screen and all of the attached internals had actually popped out of the case and were protruding from one long edge by like half a centimeter.

Don't ask me how I missed that on a first inspection.

I carefully pressed everything back into place, turned on the phone, and it's been working fine ever since. But yeah... I could deal with some more glue.

> We don't understand the point of heavily-glued batteries. This kind of planned obsolesce is completely unnecessary.

And yet when they tore down an iPhone with its glued battery, nary a mention was mentioned of the inconvenience...

>And yet when they tore down an iPhone with its glued battery, nary a mention was mentioned of the inconvenience..

A huge stink was made with the Retina Macbook Pros

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/opinion-apple-retina-...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v2h57/im_the_ifixit_gu...

Also, on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4115942

From the iPhone 5 teardown: "The battery comes out with a bit of prying once the front panel is removed." And there are no warnings that you shouldn't remove the battery and that to replace the battery you will need a whole new back assembly.

And I guess that's ignoring the fact that phones are expected to be hard to take apart whereas iFixit complained loudly about the non-repairability of the iMac. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2544...

I don't know, it kind of sounds like without glue a lot of the kinetic energy from the fall was dropped into popping the phone apart. Were it not able to fail in a reversible fashion like that, there is a chance it could have broken in a worse way.

It has always seemed to me that phones with removable batteries that go flying when the phone gets dropped are likely inherently more robust for that reason. Crumple-zones for phones.

Yeah, I started wondering about that immediately after posting. Not curious enough to try it again, though :)

You don't have to use an epoxy that dries as hard as cement. Many glues are springy, which could absorb shock without having to come apart.

A friend of mine had a large internal component come loose in his iPhone 5. AFAIK he hadn't dropped it or anything either (there were no marks on the outside, and he wasn't fessing up to anything). You could move the phone and feel and hear the internal component moving a few cm inside the body. It was very odd.

I find there's something very satisfying about a photoset like this of such a meticulous disassembly.

From the text, the part I found particularly interesting was this:

"We don't understand the point of heavily-glued batteries. This kind of planned obsolesce is completely unnecessary."

I assume they mean "obsolescence", and can see two interpretations:

1. The hardware is assumed to be replaced with a newer flashier model before the battery needs replacing so it doesn't matter that the battery is heavily-glued.

2. Making the battery hard to remove encourages upgrading when the it dies instead of merely installing a replacement.

I wonder which the author means, or both, or/and something else?

[EDIT: I see I am not the only one for whom this particular phrase jumped out of the text!]

So it's basically a disposable non-repairable piece of landfill fodder. Why do people accept this? Stuff breaks all the time either through accidental damage or otherwise. If it didn't, there wouldn't be literally millions of tech repair shops around.

Glue is just fucking lazy poor engineering if you ask me. It's an instant recognition of not being able to produce a durable mechanical modular design.

And for that price, they can fuck off as well.

At the end of the day you can get a ThinkPad for that which will last literally YEARS (the T61 I'm typing this on is 6 years old in March and still going strong with very little maintenance done).

If you're just realising this now I feel like I have some bad news for you. The whole hardware market (as green as it tries to be) is a big landfill creation machine.

I agree but there is a difference between throwing out parts and assemblies to having to throw an entire unit out due to what could be a failure of a $1 part.

I'm still running a seven year old core 2 desktop that periodically requires a new HDD or video card. It runs like a champ, so I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Also +1 for passion.

Can someone enlighten me as to why this thing contains an AVR microcontroller? This seems to be a trend; I remember one of the MacBooks had some ARM sidekick, too.

Now I don't want to be paranoid, but I generally prefer if the only general purpose computer in my computer is the CPU. It's probably hopeless by now, since every other network, graphics chip and controller runs on some ARM microcontroller variant, but to see them alone on the PCB makes me wonder what their purpose is.

If you're refererring to the Atmel UC256l3U, it's in the same area as other touchscreen components so it could be something to do with them, possibly providing some glue between them and the main processor.

I would agree. The Atmel multitouch system seems to involve the other 4 chips in that zone, so this processor is probably working with the output and doing some of the work that a kernel driver would normally do (dejiiter, smoothing, track ID matching) before presenting it to the host.

I would (also) agree.

A quick look at the handy product page that iFixit linked to (http://www.atmel.com/devices/atuc256l3u.aspx) shows that the controller has "25 touch channels", as well as supporting Atmel's "QTouch Acquisition" in hardware.

As microcontrollers go, it's pretty beefy and would have made a decent computer all by itself not too many years ago. It's a 32-bit CPU running at 50 MHz, sporting 256 KB of flash memory and 32 KB of SRAM. Granted, it's a bit low on memory for a general-purpose computer. Maybe 20 years ago, then. :)

It sure has a lot of I/O and other nice peripherals, though.

You're in for a rude awaking once you realize that there are various forms of micro-controllers spread all throughout your system and has been that way since the original IBM PC.

Read on, I realize as much. However, many of these microcontrollers work(ed?) on a completely burned in program and did not have significant computation power, or access to any meaningful interfaces.

Times have changed. Today we have full-sized ARMs loaded with binary blobs that independently serve the baseband, i.e. RF communication, of your smartphone. They talk to the application processor on a very very high level, to the point where this baseband chip has to support IPv6 natively for you to be able to use it. They are completely closed source, there is no open source alternative, and they already implement features like GPS geolocation that you do not control but directly impact your privacy. Another example would be the "silent SMS" that law enforcement uses to ping your device and get your approximate position from the tower. That chip will never inform the application processor of this, even though I'm told it has the knowledge.

Just an FYI, but all GSM control information is sent via SMS. You have thousands of them coming from your phone everyday. SMS as instant messaging is a big pot of gold for carriers since the infrastructure has to be in place for the network to even work.

Not every controller uses ARM. Some use MIPS... :)

Are there any tablets that are actually easy to repair?

ThinkPad X220. Not a "newfangled" tablet, but about the most repairable thing out there and the hardware maintenance manual is 100% available here:

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/0...

Sadly, it looks like they still have the fan placed underneath the motherboard, a design that has lingered since at least the 2006 ThinkPad X60 (both the tablet and the regular laptop version), meaning that you can't replace or grease the fan without taking much of the laptop apart.

Given that the vast majority of repairs turn into motherboard replacements (since the motherboard includes pretty much every electronic component and port), making the motherboard more quickly accessible seems higher priority than getting at the fan.

Anecdotal evidence: I've gone through multiple keyboard, motherboard, and screen replacements for the last 3 thinkpads I've owned, but never a fan replacement.

Its quite easy to get it out. Took me about 20 minutes on one.

Well, Chinese brand tablets usually at least aren't held together by an adhesive. You can see a teardown of one here: http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/33614-window-n90-dual-core-i.... Use a password from BugMeNot if you aren't registered.

The Nexus tablets are much easier to repair.

As well as the Kindle Fire (8/10)

This is not only tablets. Every recent hardware is made to not be repairable.

Recently my Nokia E5 phone had been malfunctioning in a common way for the model that involves the headphone jack [1] and since it was out of warranty I decided to take it apart. What I found inside filled me with a newfound respect for Nokia's engineers. The phone's mainboard attached to the case with just 4 Torx screws and the replaceable modules like the headphone jack module and the LED flesh simply set in small compartments inside the back cover assembly. The modules connected to the mainboard through exposed flat contacts that would be held against similar contacts on the board when the phone was assembled. There were no tiny ribbon cables except for the one connecting the display. Ultimately, I was able to repair the phone by rubbing the PCB contacts that corresponded to the headphone module with an eraser to clean them.

I had previously disassembled an HP Palm Pre 2 and it wasn't pretty at all by comparison -- too much double-sided tape inside. With Symbian near dead chances are that my next phone will have a touchscreen, which makes me wonder if many touchscreen phones offer that kind of repairability.

[1] The so-called "Select Enhancement" problem. See https://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&output=search....

I think you are somewhat mixing cause and effect. Hardware is more and more made to be small and look good. Replacing a bracket by some glue helps make the package smaller (tip for Apple: make tolerances even smaller, so that batteries fit so tight that you don't even need glue)

Also, labour costs are so high (or, alternatively, electronics are so cheap) that there is little pressure to improve repairability and lots of pressure to decrease construction costs (even for stuff made in low wage countries)

I think hard-to-repairness mostly comes as a consequence of these.

At the other end of the spectrum, Lego and Meccano are cool, but few people would buy stuff made from it.

I just tried to replace a hard drive in a mac mini, now it's in the shop getting the fan I broke replaced heh.

For most people its not repairable. Some of us enjoy the challenge.

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