

Microsoft Surface Pro Teardown - dan1234
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+Teardown/12842/1?singlePage

======
Cushman
> 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.

~~~
FireBeyond
> 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...

~~~
vvhn
>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.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/opinion-apple-retina-
displa/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v2h57/im_the_ifixit_gu...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v2h57/im_the_ifixit_guy_who_took_apart_the_new_retina/)

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

------
JDGM
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!]

------
meaty
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).

~~~
skeletonjelly
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.

~~~
meaty
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.

------
revelation
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.

~~~
dan1234
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.

~~~
joezydeco
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.

------
benologist
Are there any tablets that are actually easy to repair?

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

~~~
networked
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...](https://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&sclient=psy-
ab&q=nokia+e5+select+enhancement).

