Microsoft Releases Surface Laptop SE Repair Video - Isn't Competition Great?

[Bseagull]

 

Summary

Microsoft has published a video showing how to disassemble and replace components such as the keyboard, WiFi module, battery, and screen on their Surface Laptop SE. The host noted that he didn't even have to change screwdriver bits to take the whole laptop apart.

 

Quotes (From the Video Description)

Quote

 

Surface Laptop SE has replaceable components, including the keyboard, display, and battery. Watch Branden demonstrate how to take the device apart with minimal tools.

 

My thoughts

This seems to be a clear response to increasing competition in the trend to make devices more repairable. Lots of nice little details, like the fact that the battery has built in mounting hardware with no adhesives. It looks to me to be modeled off Steam's Steam Deck teardown video, though notably it seems that Microsoft almost encourages opening the laptop up and replacing parts. It'll be interesting to see how Apple responds to this, as well as if Microsoft is able to scale this reparability and openness to other devices, such as their infamously unrepairable Surface Laptop Studio (or rather, other devices like it in the future).

 

Also worth noting that they're using standard iFixit tools - further signs of their developing partnership.

 

Sources

 

[That Franc]

I've got a Surface Pro 8, and it's absolutely monolithic, the only way to get inside is to fight the front glass adhesive which I don't think I'm qualified or brave enough to do. The only nice thing about it is that the SSD cover is easily removable allowing to swap the drive to any other M.2 2230.

 

I do like that they're making a move towards better repairability though, only thing I'm still curious about is how soon they're going to find a way to reverse the course again.

[Radium_Angel]

12 minutes ago, That Franc said:

only thing I'm still curious about is how soon they're going to find a way to reverse the course again.

The moment they can get their PAC to bribe congress to not pass the "right to repair" law.

[TetraSky]

Well, at least the battery is not glued in.
Other than that... Modular wifi module is nice, since that's often one of the part that fails.

But everything else being soldered is meh. If they can put a slot for the wifi module, why couldn't they put a slot for the RAM as well? Or for a small NVME drive? Could've just shoved it under the keyboard if they had no space on the mainboard, simply link the two with a cable.

 

The fact that this laptop comes by default with soldered 64GB to 128GB of eMMC storage... Is frankly a joke.

128GB should've been the minimum, not 64GB.

Once you have Windows, Office and a few other stuff like required softwares for school, you're already over the 64GB capacity.

No wonder they are pushing for all that cloud BS by giving out 1TB of cloud space with it (though is that forever or for a year and then you're asked to pay up?). It's because they still can't make a useable laptop with proper storage space, thus requiring you to rely on the cloud.

 

That and the base model is a God damn dual core, again. WHY.

[Paul Thexton]

10 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

128GB should've been the minimum, not 64GB.

Once you have Windows, Office and a few other stuff like required softwares for school, you're already over the 64GB capacity.

Does Windows update still work in “fill my hard drive” mode these days under the guise of “but what if you want to roll back 4 years of updates?”

[Radium_Angel]

11 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Could've just shoved it under the keyboard

Because then it wouldn't be THIN!!!!!!!!!!1111

A nasty trend Apple started, and others slavishly follow.

[TetraSky]

21 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

Does Windows update still work in “fill my hard drive” mode these days under the guise of “but what if you want to roll back 4 years of updates?”

Yes. It should be automatically cleaning itself up, but more often than not, it doesn't. So you do a manual Disk Clean Up and find out there's 7GB of old windows update files on your PC.

20 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Because then it wouldn't be THIN!!!!!!!!!!1111

A nasty trend Apple started, and others slavishly follow.

Frame.work has proven that you can have modular everything while still being pretty damn thin.

According to the tech specs, the Surface Laptop SE is 17.85mm thick. The Framework laptop is 15.85mm thick.

There's no excuse.

[Radium_Angel]

1 minute ago, TetraSky said:

There's no excuse.

Except the revenue cycle.

If you can upgrade your current system, that means you can put off buying a whole new system...and the shareholders won't like that.

/c (for cynical)

 

[Quackers101]

kinda nice, the cables seem long enough too.

plastic clips? eeeh, but I guess it can work fine. Performance and cost? looked very bare and maybe not fully thought out. I do find it a bit fun they mentioned the rubber feet on the laptop, aren't they kind of known for doing this?

 

Although just a tweezer and one screw tip to disassemble it, that is nice.

[GoodBytes]

9 hours ago, That Franc said:

I've got a Surface Pro 8, and it's absolutely monolithic, the only way to get inside is to fight the front glass adhesive which I don't think I'm qualified or brave enough to do. The only nice thing about it is that the SSD cover is easily removable allowing to swap the drive to any other M.2 2230.

 

I do like that they're making a move towards better repairability though, only thing I'm still curious about is how soon they're going to find a way to reverse the course again.

I have opened my Surface Pro 3. The Pro 3 has stronger glue than the later models. iFixit had a lot of trouble, from their and other experiences I saw, the solution is to get a good hair dryer that can get really hot, or an actual heat gun. Then what you want to do is take your time, and put the device on a towel ( to help retain heat, and not scratch the device on the table) then you heat up the towel with the hair dryer, than heat the back of the Surface well, then the towel again and deposit it on it, then you heat up the whole glass but especially focusing on the edges. Then do like iFixIt use a series of pick and slowly use heat and picks to lift the screen. Take your time the glass isn't flexible, slide a hint the pick and use heat, let it lift by itself, the. slide a bit more and use heat. If you go fast, then the screen will cost you around 150$ to replace over on AliExpress. 

 

In my case, I had nothing to loose, the thermal past dried up, and the device was unusable. So I had to open it. So I did. Was a success. I cleaned out the internal dust, put new thermal paste, and I went crazy and put on both side of the CPU heatsink to use the screen and metal back of the unit as hear sink. I never had my SP3 perform so well. At the expense of a hot spot on the rear of the device, I made the SP3 match in performance the SP2 (identical specs, but the SP2 was larger device, had thicker heatsinks (2 of them), where each had a fan. I am sure the SP2 could deliver more continuous performance over my modded SP3, but nice to see the performance bump, especially that now, Win11 is more demanding (and so is Win10 over the years).

 

Keep on mind that the glue doesn't really stick to your finger, you might think "Oh great, now I can easily removed the screen later on... NO!" That glue is SUPER sticky in glass. I miss aligned my screen I lift it, and boom I cracked the corner of the screen and now touch is broken...  

[poochyena]

9 hours ago, TetraSky said:

The fact that this laptop comes by default with soldered 64GB to 128GB of eMMC storage... Is frankly a joke.

128GB should've been the minimum, not 64GB.

wait.. why? Thats a laptop for schools, just to save files and write documents. You don't need much space at all for that. I bought a tablet (android) with only 32GB of storage and that is plenty for me since all I need it for is to check emails, play music, watch videos, etc. Not using it to store videos or play video games.

 

9 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Once you have Windows, Office and a few other stuff like required softwares for school, you're already over the 64GB capacity.

According to the system requirements page for microsoft office that I found, it only takes up 4GB of storage. Windows 10 is 16GB.

[TetraSky]

2 hours ago, poochyena said:

According to the system requirements page for microsoft office that I found, it only takes up 4GB of storage. Windows 10 is 16GB.

Windows 10 will never really be 16GB, due to various difference in size of pagefile, hiberfile, windows updates and what not. On a clean install of Win10 that I just tested, it was 20GB just for Windows alone before any updates on a 64GB VM with 6GB of RAM. Office does take about 4GB though.
 

Then there's all the other software schools will install on it.
They never just put Windows on there with a handful of things for each specific student.

They make a single windows image for the entire school, that includes all the software each classes will ever use. I easily estimate an extra 10GB+ worth of software from that alone (which I can somewhat estimate using Ninite to install the same software I've actually seen on school computers, not including the big software that may or may not be course/year specific, like the adobe suite, autocad, solidworks, etc.)

Add to that the recovery partition and you're losing another 10GB, possibly more if it's a custom partition with all the school's stuff on it.

2 hours ago, poochyena said:

I bought a tablet (android) with only 32GB of storage and that is plenty for me

You can't really compare Android to Windows here... I had a Windows tablet with 32GB of storage, it was filled up with just Windows and a handful of things, I had to install everything on a super slow microSD, making it nearly unusable.

 

2 hours ago, poochyena said:

wait.. why? Thats a laptop for schools, just to save files and write documents. You don't need much space at all for that.

As for why 64GB is not enough... You're already at an estimated 45GB out of 59GB useable space(in windows, GB = GiB, so 64GB = 59GiB=59GB)...

While I am sure for most students in primary education this 14GB of remaining space would be somewhat enough, it would still get filled up relatively quick because no one truly only use those laptop just for school.

And yes, storing videos might be required for them if the teacher pre-record stuff and doesn't upload it to youtube, making you download the video file instead... I had one such teacher a year ago.

Temporary files, software updates and all that will take up space over time ... I may be cynical, but due to the fact that I have a literal 18 years old in my college course who didn't even know what a Start Menu is , I don't expect all of them to know how to clean up temporary files either (they wouldn't be able to clean up windows update's temporary files, that's for sure, considering this requires admin privilege)

Also, documents for each classes can fill up quickly. 

As an example, in 2 years I've accumulated 8.23GB worth of files from my various classes, which I can't just delete because it's all cumulative. Not including everything in OneDrive that I needed to access from both home and college, which would bring that number closer to 15GB. So just from that alone I'd be busting that limit...

Now I get these laptops are totally not aimed at higher education and will most likely not see more than 1 or 2 GB of schoolwork done on them, but still, 64GB is barely enough these days when a single 1080p60 video is like 1GB in temporary file (usually gets deleted by itself, but everything else doesn't. A month of constant web browsing is heavy on the temp files)
Especially when and if they ever upgrade to newer laptops, where will the old ones go? The landfill? I sure hope not and that they either give them away or resell them for a second life. Whoever gets them might want to do a bit more with them.

[RejZoR]

13 hours ago, That Franc said:

I've got a Surface Pro 8, and it's absolutely monolithic, the only way to get inside is to fight the front glass adhesive which I don't think I'm qualified or brave enough to do. The only nice thing about it is that the SSD cover is easily removable allowing to swap the drive to any other M.2 2230.

 

I do like that they're making a move towards better repairability though, only thing I'm still curious about is how soon they're going to find a way to reverse the course again.

I was servicing ancient ACER Aspire 5520G recently and my god it was easy to work on those things from back in the day. Few screws on the bottom that are not hidden in any way and whoe panel for CPU, GPU, WiFi and RAM comes off. HDD has its own cover with 2 screws.

 

Recent HP laptop that I have, you need to peel of a rubber strip that acts as laptop feet to uncover hidden screws and then pry the thing open with pry tools otherwise you fuck up entire chassis because the edge between keyboard and chassis is on top and fully visible. When you think of it, it's so stupid.

[Quackers101]

23 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Well, at least the battery is not glued in.

 

The fact that this laptop comes by default with soldered 64GB to 128GB of eMMC storage... Is frankly a joke.

128GB should've been the minimum, not 64GB.

 

That and the base model is a God damn dual core, again. WHY.

I don't have issues with glue or rather sticky tabs, and if those are sold in store and used "correctly". So you don't get custom designs like this that cost more and make the device bigger than needed? nor having a battery glued shut, might be harder to do in some designs, that are not as compact like a phone.

 

Agreed if they would just want a simple tablet or used for nothing else device, but if not, its not great.

Can it upgrade to windows 11? oh it is, with an celeron CPU. Around the cheaper 250 dollars, although not worth it either.

 

For twice the price of 250 into 500 dollars, you can get double the performance or better of an ryzen 2200U or newer intel chips, better graphics, better screen and 1 TB of storage. With enough RAM too as this model goes between 4 GB to 8 GB.

[Donut417]

Just wanted to mention in case no one’s did. Louis Rossmann asked his suppliers about parts for this device. Not one supplier had parts. His community was also asked and none knew of any. So while you can tear it down, finding replacement parts could be next to impossible, at least right now.