Microsoft Surface Go Receives Repairability Score of 1 Out of 10

Megalith

Megalith

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Microsoft introduced their latest member of the Surface family last month, the Surface Go, a $399 2-in-1 powered by an Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y processor. While the device is commendable in that it offers the full desktop experience (Windows 10 S can be switched to Windows 10 Home) at an affordable price, iFixit opened the Go this week and found it awfully difficult to repair, just like its predecessors.

The smaller form factor seems to make the glass easier to remove without breaking, but it's still terrifyingly hard. If this is expected to replace a PC, the lack of upgradability will severely limit the device's lifespan. The lack of modularity, especially on high-wear ports, makes repairs unnecessarily expensive. Adhesive holds many components in place, including the display and battery. Replacement of any part requires removal of the display assembly, an easy (and expensive) part to damage.
 
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Got the 8 GB RAM/128 GB SSD version Thursday at Best Buy, they had a $50 gift certificate with pre-orders that I use to towards the Type Cover. Not at all surprised by the iFixit score, Surface devices just aren't user repairable.

So far I'm impressed by it. The tablet itself is very light and easily held in one hand at only 18 ounces, makes a great portable writing or drawing device. So far performance has been very solid, no problem loading up Word, Excel, 20 tabs in Edge. Chrome seems to struggle though and it's kind of odd to me because I have other low power Windows 10 devices and while Edge always runs more smoothly on those devices, the performance gap between Edge and Chrome on the Go is striking. Edge apparently has been optimized to run well on this thing.

The biggest issue I see is the battery life, about 6 hours of continuous real world use in my experience thus far. But even with the Type Cover and pen the whole package is still only 1.75 lbs. A device of this size, performance and overall build quality with 6 hours of battery life while not good when compared to mobile OS tablets is pretty great for an x86 device.
 
1_rick said:
The question, I guess, is, can you make something that small and use screws and stuff instead of all the glue?
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And that's always the question. While weight and thinness are often pursued for their own sake they are extremely important in a device like this, every gram and millimeter counts. There's so many constraints going on. Weight, thermals, cost, performance and battery life. Add in reparability and then that's something that's going to conflict with the others. It would be nice to have a user replaceable battery though.
 
96redformula said:
I might be on the wrong side of this argument...but why would you want to do upgrades to these again? It kinda seems like asking to change parts in your phone.....
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For me the big item to repair/upgrade on both phones and devices like this would be the battery. If you can't replace the battery it will eventually be useless dead hardware no matter what your use case or needs are as all batteries eventually die.
 
1_rick said:
The question, I guess, is, can you make something that small and use screws and stuff instead of all the glue?
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Ya you can but heres the thing reviewers will shit all over you for lack of build quality rofl. Years ago Samsung showed everyone that they could build a phone that was water resistant, had all the features of every other phone, did it in the same amount of space, and had a removable battery, cost the same amount of money, and was a flagship device. What was the result reviewers said screw this plastic piece of shit we want an iPhone. Customers listened to reviewers. Samsung shifted focus.


With apple making money hand over fist most companies just don't see any reason not to keep doing what apple does. Most consumers get buy phones with very limited knowledge and they make decisions on the most basic of information. If 1000 customers walk into a phone store, some will buy the cheapest phone with NO questions about anything else. Others will take the most expensive, some will buy what ever they had last for familiarity, others will buy whatever seems to have the most hype on facebook or whatever. But very few will carefully weigh the pros and cons and do research, and demand long life. So sealing the battery only loses you a tiny amount of customers and promises at least one group the guys who just buy what they had last will be back in a couple years when their battery is running low.
 
The battery concerns are a good point.

For myself, I usually get tired of how sluggish the system feels before the batteries fully wear out.

And that's usually on a system where i have already upgraded the RAM to max capacity.
 
rudy said:
Ya you can but heres the thing reviewers will shit all over you for lack of build quality rofl. Years ago Samsung showed everyone that they could build a phone that was water resistant, had all the features of every other phone, did it in the same amount of space, and had a removable battery, cost the same amount of money, and was a flagship device. What was the result reviewers said screw this plastic piece of shit we want an iPhone. Customers listened to reviewers. Samsung shifted focus...
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I actually bought one of those Samsung phones. Far prefer it over anything that Samsung put out in its Galaxy S line since. Why? Because I hate iphones. Up until the Galaxy S6, they thumbed their nose at the iPhones of the world and let me swap batteries and expand my storage to my heart's content. When they started making their phones into iPhones that run android, I stopped buying them. I still use my Galaxy S5. I have a few spare battgeries and a 256GB microSD card in it. When I want new Android features I simply pop on one of the many distros of AOSP-based drops that I can get any time at xdadevelopers. So let Samsung and Apple and Microsoft make their unsupportable hardware. I will keep using my old supportable hardware that never dies.
 
A few years ago when HP was trying to get their foot in the door in the Windows tab with the Elite Pad x2 (I believe this was the model...), IT departments who had the necessary training/certification could get a special tool that released a mechanism behind the screen and allowed them to remove the screen and service the unit...

The reality I believe here is that the cost of that Elite Pad x2 was too high for people to be interested in it, building serviceability into the design costs more than just slapping a bunch of adhesive in to hold everything together...

I am not one bit surprised that serviceability of this unit is considered hard...
 
cyberguyz said:
So let Samsung and Apple and Microsoft make their unsupportable hardware. I will keep using my old supportable hardware that never dies.
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The Go is approaching the lower limits of weight and size while still being capable of mainstream productivity. Whether or not it accomplishes this goal is the subject of reviews. You simply just add much weight and size to this thing, the tablet section had to be close to a pound and the whole package needed to stay well under 2 lbs. And the cost is already considered too high for some so adding more serviceability at greater cost isn't much of an option.
 
Complaining about repairable on a product this small and this cheap is a joke, a tablet is effectively just four parts, the shell, the screen, the battery, and the main board, (ok, five, the heatsink).

In a form factor this slim it's not practical to use mechanic fasteners, so bonding it closed is the only practical option, using strong adhesive to bond the screen to the shell, increase the stiffness and strength of the whole package. (You don't want the whole tablet flexing every time you flip open the kick stand)

A modular main board would just increase cost, and require the tablet to be thicker and heavier, and the only part I can think you would want to be modular is the external ports in case they were damaged, everything else it's more practical to have soldered to one board, simplicity makes for more reliability and saves of cost.

Most people aren't going to have the patients, skill or tools to fix it themselves, so the cost of labor to have it repaired will be 1/3-1/2 the cost of the tablet without parts.

Yes more expensive product like the iMac Pro should be serviceable, but they cost thousands and a in a form factor allow for greater modularity.
 
taz-nz said:
Complaining about repairable on a product this small and this cheap is a joke, a tablet is effectively just four parts, the shell, the screen, the battery, and the main board, (ok, five, the heatsink).

In a form factor this slim it's not practical to use mechanic fasteners, so bonding it closed is the only practical option, using strong adhesive to bond the screen to the shell, increase the stiffness and strength of the whole package. (You don't want the whole tablet flexing every time you flip open the kick stand)

A modular main board would just increase cost, and require the tablet to be thicker and heavier, and the only part I can think you would want to be modular is the external ports in case they were damaged, everything else it's more practical to have soldered to one board, simplicity makes for more reliability and saves of cost.

Most people aren't going to have the patients, skill or tools to fix it themselves, so the cost of labor to have it repaired will be 1/3-1/2 the cost of the tablet without parts.

Yes more expensive product like the iMac Pro should be serviceable, but they cost thousands and a in a form factor allow for greater modularity.
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This tablet was made for Joe Consumer, obviously. Assuming you could make the dream device everyone on this forum would love to have, it would be to expensive for the market it is aimed at by an order of magnitude.
 
motomonkey said:
This tablet was made for Joe Consumer, obviously. Assuming you could make the dream device everyone on this forum would love to have, it would be to expensive for the market it is aimed at by an order of magnitude.
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Well, that's not entirely true.
There was an age where Android tablets were decently serviceable, as in you could unscrew the back cover and replace the battery.
Being an Android device, they didn't exactly have an upgradable anything on the inside, but at least they weren't completely glued together.

They were roughly similar in price to the Surface Go.
 
MrDeaf said:
Well, that's not entirely true.
There was an age where Android tablets were decently serviceable, as in you could unscrew the back cover and replace the battery.
Being an Android device, they didn't exactly have an upgradable anything on the inside, but at least they weren't completely glued together.

They were roughly similar in price to the Surface Go.
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How serviceable are the Surface Pros? at the price point they are at I would hope they are a bit better
 
BlakLanner said:
For me the big item to repair/upgrade on both phones and devices like this would be the battery. If you can't replace the battery it will eventually be useless dead hardware no matter what your use case or needs are as all batteries eventually die.
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But you can still permanently plug it into a power adapter and use it like an old desktop, can't you?
 
motomonkey said:
How serviceable are the Surface Pros? at the price point they are at I would hope they are a bit better
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It says right up there, 1/10 serviceability.
Microsoft has been pretty good at copying Apple, right down to the serviceability of their tablets... unfortunately.

IDK, it's not like this form factor requires everything to be glued together, since it wasn't so long ago when Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire scored a 7/10 and 8/10, respectively.
 
motomonkey said:
This tablet was made for Joe Consumer, obviously. Assuming you could make the dream device everyone on this forum would love to have, it would be to expensive for the market it is aimed at by an order of magnitude.
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This is just plain false. As I mentioned above Samsung showed years ago that making a device that is vastly more repairable is perfectly doable. And even in recent years Apples devices are vastly more repairable. For instance the iPhone 8 scored a 6 out of 10.
 
96redformula said:
I might be on the wrong side of this argument...but why would you want to do upgrades to these again? It kinda seems like asking to change parts in your phone.....
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Exactly. And for the most common intended tasks, there's no NEED to upgrade it, it will probably be dropped and broken long before it becomes not powerful enough to do email, browse the web, and use Office apps. An "Enthusiast" looks at it with disdain, but that's not the target market here. No one doing basic computational tasks needs some massive 4+GHz 32 core processor with 32GB RAM and several TB of storage. Not too long ago I build a second desktop to use at my workbench. It's there to do browsing, programming, and electronic stuff. I used an I3 instead of an I7. It has 8GB AM. It handles what I use it for with plenty of speed, just as fast as my higher configured laptop and other desktop do when performing the same tasks. Games? Not likely - it only has integrated video, no discrete GPU. But the point is - it wasn't built for that purpose. Ok, I could potentially upgrade it (it's a mini-ITX cube, so power and space for a powerful GPU are rather limited), but the real point is, there's no need. Nothing I do with it now or in the foreseeable future exceeds the capabilities of it. Computers have been like that for a long time now. So, to a lesser extent, are smartphones. f not for the cult of (insert favorite flagship device here) buying the marketing hype for their respective manufacturers, there's absolutely no reason to upgrade to every new model for 99.9% of the users. I'm no Apple fanboi, but I do like their phones - except I am still using a 5S because it works, the battery still lasts all day, and it does what I need it to do. I have thus far had zero reason to buy a new one.
 
So we substitute one time use paper with one time use computers... Ahh humans, we are going nowhere fast.
 
Uvaman2 said:
So we substitute one time use paper with one time use computers... Ahh humans, we are going nowhere fast.
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Not sure how something that should last for years like a Go is one time use. And it's not like the device can't be recycled. You don't, or shouldn't, just throw these things in the garbage. Like literally you shouldn't with anything with a li-ion battery.
 
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The only feature of the Surface Go that interests me is the inclusion of a USB-C port. I've held off on upgrading my surface pro, as I was waiting patiently for this inclusion.

Hopefully the next generation of Surface Pro's will include USB C.
 
Jahx said:
The only feature of the Surface Go that interests me is the inclusion of a USB-C port.
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USB-C charging is cool. But I have a ton of Surface connect chargers so that's how I normally charge though on the go charging via C is nice to have.

The Verge came out with it's review, even mentioning the low iFixit reparability score but for a Windows device they were pretty glowing: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17657174/microsoft-surface-go-review-tablet-windows-10. My biggest issue with it is the battery life, seems like 6 hours on constant mainstream use is that most are getting. The C charging does come in handy if you need to be portable for longer and it does charge fast.

I think the device will do well and should drive OEMs to copy the size in better attempts in smaller Windows tablets than what we have do date.
 
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