Self Repair May Be Difficult on Microsoft Tablet

It wasn’t long ago when techies could pull apart their computers or other devices and perform most repairs on their own. That age appears to be fading with tablets. The iFixit crew has been helping us out by tearing apart devices and taking some of the mystery out of the process that keeps us from being willing to give it a try ourselves. But even they have found a tough challenger in the Microsoft Surface tablet. It seems to be second only to the iPad for difficulty in self repair.

While Microsoft is late to the tablet party, they are making quite a showing with the impressive specs on the Surface, which holds up fairly well to the iPad (at least on paper). Of course, with technology advancing so quickly, tablets become outdated in months, not years. Could you upgrade your current tablet instead of having to replace it annually?

Your laptop may have a nifty screw off door to get in and make adjustments, but there is no such thing on a tablet. You have to go full B&E (breaking and entering, for those who don’t know the term) to get into one of these things. Not something that many of us are willing to do with something that costs hundreds of dollars. While iFixit discovered Android tablets are not bad to work with once inside, they unfortunately found the innards of the Surface to be more like the impossible-to-decipher iPad.

First of all, when you break open your surface, a tamper resistant trap is tripped to show that you have been in there. The battery is easier to get to than the one in the iPad. There is also an extra speaker in there. What does it do? Who knows? But the suspicion is that it makes the keypad sounds.

So how did iFixit rate the overall repairability of the device? A 4 out of 10. By comparison, all models of the iPad received a score of 2 while popular Android tablets were ranked between 6 and 8.

Of course, most of this information will not be useful to the average consumer. We will continue to take our tablets to a professional to get them repaired, and likely continue to shell out the cash for new models instead of trying to upgrade our old ones.

Then there are the technology lovers who will enjoy using this info to examine the innards of their devices and learn how they tick without doing extremely costly damage to them.