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Microsoft Surface Pro Earns Repairability Score of 1/10 from iFixit
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Yeah because as we all know the MBA/MBP circuit boards are made of the same material as Cylon ships....give me a break
I confirm, this is true, they are!
The Microsoft Product Manager for the Surface Pro must be crying to see his one sale torn apart!
lolling
Comparing an iPad teardown and this says a lot about the two companies. There is an elegance that permeates the iPad and apple products. The whole product is designed. MS have pulled together a bunch of parts and fitted it in the box.
Apple is open about what it does. A blind man can see what they do well. MS is completely oblivious to each aspect. The MS tablet looks like it was taken for a run through the mediocre forest and hit every tree on the way through.
Comparing to an Air - I have an Air. Excluding the factor of connecting to the Apple system. If I look at all the important factors the MS tablet would score very low. It doesn't do the job well.
Comparing to an iPad - my wife is about to buy our first tablet. She's looking at the iPad. Excluding the Apple system when we look at all the factors that are important to her this MS tablet again scores poorly.
Apple needs competition. Sadly I don't think MS is it or ever will be. They're just too ignorant of customer needs, too ignorant of where the competition are at and caught up in their own reality distortion field. They look like Detroit when the motor industry changed in front of their eyes.
When I look at this product I see PC production values of a decade ago.
Steve Jobs Quote - says it best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOgOP_aqqtg
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste. And what that means is, I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. In a sense, that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products...
I guess I'm saddened not by Microsofts success. I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really 3rd grade products."
Apple is open about what it does. A blind man can see what they do well. MS is completely oblivious to each aspect. The MS tablet looks like it was taken for a run through the mediocre forest and hit every tree on the way through.
Comparing to an Air - I have an Air. Excluding the factor of connecting to the Apple system. If I look at all the important factors the MS tablet would score very low. It doesn't do the job well.
Comparing to an iPad - my wife is about to buy our first tablet. She's looking at the iPad. Excluding the Apple system when we look at all the factors that are important to her this MS tablet again scores poorly.
Apple needs competition. Sadly I don't think MS is it or ever will be. They're just too ignorant of customer needs, too ignorant of where the competition are at and caught up in their own reality distortion field. They look like Detroit when the motor industry changed in front of their eyes.
When I look at this product I see PC production values of a decade ago.
Steve Jobs Quote - says it best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOgOP_aqqtg
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste. And what that means is, I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. In a sense, that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products...
I guess I'm saddened not by Microsofts success. I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really 3rd grade products."
Err... what?
The teardown of an iPad 4:
The teardown of a MacBook Air (Which is sort of a fair comparison since the Surface Pro sort of competes with it):
And this is significantly different from the Surface, and much more elegant... how? Because Apple's logic board is smaller?
I was surprised the Surface Pro didn't have a VGA port
Fans in a tablet = not ready for prime time.
Fans in a tablet = not ready for prime time.
Same thing will happen when the competition's ecosystems go to the curated software model like Apple's app store. That will be just fine by then. Apple leads the way. The competition snickers, laughs, points fingers, predicts doom and gloom, and then proceeds to follow suit a few years later when Apple's model rips them a new one. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Okay I'll bite since I saw what the person your quoting was talking about.
With Microsofts logic board it has an obvious grid pattern, and chips were simply stuck into that grid as saw necessary. I could be completely wrong, but it appears from my perspective like Microsoft put very little thought into designing the logic board so that space was used efficiently.
On the other hand, every time I see one of Apple's logic boards I am amazed by how cramped they make it, obviously without sacrificing functionality. Which gives off an impression of being highly engineered.
It really does not matter either way, but I think its a valid observation.
I was surprised the Surface Pro didn't have a VGA port
Fans in a tablet = not ready for prime time.
well, surface pro is more than a tablet.. I'm not buying one, but I'm glad they are pushing processing power.
I would love x86 in an iPad. Bring fans too, I don't care (of course we'd all rather they weren't necessary). I've never complained about my tech being to cool
lolz lolz lolz @ Micro$oft. Anyways we all know iFixit bashes new technology like this because it puts their parts business out of work. That's right iFixit, we don't need you.
OK, fair enough, but that doesn't really warrant the hyperbole that the rest of the post contained. I sensed a whole lot of confirmation bias going on.
However, the poster's observations -- "The whole product is designed. MS have pulled together a bunch of parts and fitted it in the box." would have fit very well if describing, say, the G5/Mac Pro tower compared to a typical generic beige box PC. Truly, those were just a bunch of parts fitted into a generic box, while Apple engineered every little thing about the G5/Pro tower.
But today's devices are all custom-designed, engineered for space with custom parts everywhere. And you're absolutely right, the Surface logic board could be cleaned up and made smaller, but that's just one part out of many.
It's funny how custom parts are construed as a good thing now. I would pay extra for standard, interchangeable parts
Considering the MacBook Air and the Surface pro both use an i5 CPU and BOTH have fans, the Air must not be ready for prime time either!I was surprised the Surface Pro didn't have a VGA port
Fans in a tablet = not ready for prime time.
Seriously... stop comparing the Surface Pro to an ARM based tablet.
It's basically a touchscreen ultrabook with a detachable keyboard, not a tablet.
The Surface (RT) does not have any fans... feel better.
No, let's stop with the "lol, look how unservicable Apple products are"... its the way things are... get used to it.
If I were to take a guess, I'd say the motherboard was made as large as it was so MS could spread all the components apart to even out heat distribution and cool the machine off with two smaller, quieter fans, rather than one large one.
A larger size doesn't necessarily mean it's badly designed. Microsoft isn't staffed with a bunch of idiots slapping together components just so they could rush it out the dark. There's always a reason for everything.
Can't argue there. It looks very much like they just laid out components as if they were on individual circuit boards and then linked them together, rather than actually laying things out as a whole. If they'd done that, they probably could have fit another 2 hours worth of battery inside the thing.
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I've always referred to that as my MacBook 'snoring'. (That's the sign to let me know it's actually asleep.)
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Look at all the empty, wasted space on the Surface's logic board. Imagine condensing the logic board down so that empty space wasn't there, and being able to fill the resulting volume with additional battery.
That's likely why he called it 'crude'. Wasted space actually is a bad thing when you're trying to make a small device.
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It's funny how custom parts are construed as a good thing now. I would pay extra for standard, interchangeable parts
The Surface's board is still a custom part. It's just a custom part with a lot of wasted volume.
Sadly, in packages this size, standard, interchangeable parts are likely to remain a dream for a good long while. There simply isn't the necessary *room* to to fit arbitrary components into the space.
Seems to me its Microsoft and MS fans who insist on calling the Surface a tablet and get offended when others refer to it as a laptop. I don't think of it as a tablet because a)awful battery life for a tablet, b)requires a fan and c)is rarely ever shown being used without the keyboard or in portrait orientation. To me it has all the trademarks of a laptop except the guts are behind the screen not the keyboard.Considering the MacBook Air and the Surface pro both use an i5 CPU and BOTH have fans, the Air must not be ready for prime time either!
Seriously... stop comparing the Surface Pro to an ARM based tablet.
It's basically a touchscreen ultrabook with a detachable keyboard, not a tablet.
The Surface (RT) does not have any fans... feel better.
Yep the lack of the light on more recent models makes them harder to trust, and OS X's sleep situation has been unreliable enough since they integrated hibernate, without my not being able to be sure. And indeed, it always was a comforting pulsating light, even if it could light up the whole room and stop me sleeping ><.
Pretty crazy how tight everything is in these machines now, but indeed Surface Pro is up against the MacBook Air or 13" rMBP ... which it beats the out of box supported resolution of on a smaller screen just btw. And it adds a touchscreen - if an MBP got that, it would probably be the better Windows machine, but until then, once you go touch you can't go back, and Windows 8 does a really good job of it.