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Comment on Surface Pro 9 teardown reveals modular parts, Microsoft’s 2023 repair plansparent

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The tone of this comment is abrasive, but I agree. I _thought_ IFixIt's whole scoring system was about repairability. Not performance, not best value but also repairable.

Feels weird to just throw that out.

Also how does this get a 7/10 when you still have to unglue the screen to do anything but a storage upgrade?

Sorry. The tone is abrasive because it's channeling years of having to tell customers with a broken 1500 or even 1000 Euro laptop that it can't be fixed because the manufacturer put zero effort into repairability and, while I wish I could do anything at all to help them, all I can do is tell them 'sorry'. I hated letting down my customers. Meanwhile, companies like Microsoft are making money hand over fist with this stuff with no regard to what happens after the warranty period ends. It makes me furious.

Context is key with these repairability ratings. I always assumed that a score of 7 for a phone means something different than a score of 7 for a laptop or tablet.

It’s not reasonable to expect that a tablet would ever provide modular RAM. It just doesn’t make sense for that form factor.

Just from reading the thread I think a lot of people are mixing up Reparability and upgradeability.

Two sides of the same coin. Hurting one hurts the other, both help improve device longevity, and both help encourage a more open and modular design.

I think they're still separate issues in specific cases.

For example, if you made a motherboard with user-removable capacitors, that would not enable any significant upgradability, only repairability.

Another situation: If you have a $100 device and it has a major component that takes up most of the overall device cost (let's say, $80), making that $80 component modular/removable/replaceable doesn't aid repairability all that much. If that component fails, my entire device is "totaled."

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