hey this is taylor today i'm going to be
tearing down the new dell xps 15 laptop
i'm really excited about these new xps
machines i think that they're going to
be great competition for the macbook pro
lineup
they are cheaper they have an sd card
slot and most importantly i think
they're going to be significantly more
repairable
on the back side we can see right off
the bat they're using torque screws
instead of pentalobe screws to secure
the lower case which is a win
let's get those out of the way and see
what we find inside
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often the lower case is screwed and
clipped
in place i'm guessing this will have
some clips
dell has actually done something really
cool here they put a
small notch on the lower case
where you can insert a opening pick or a
pry tool
to get the lower case free
now that all the clips are free we can
remove this lower case
and bam once the lower case is removed
we can see the cooling solution we've
got two fans here with some heat pipes
running over the processor
below that we've got two sodium slots
for memory and then
two m.2 slots for storage only one of
them is populated here but you can stick
another m.2 drive
in this one right here having upgradable
memory and storage in a laptop is
huge for repairability most modern
laptops have soldered on storage and
memory which means
should either of those components go bad
you are looking at
either some intense micro soldering
or you're just out of luck before we get
to either of those things
i'm going to disconnect the battery and
see if we can replace that
it's always a good idea to disconnect
the battery of
anything that you're repairing before
you do any kind of repair
this one is being a little stubborn i'm
bad at cables but i'm not as bad as kk
so i should be able to do this dell has
included a little pull tab here
on the wire i'm going to try and use
that to kind of
coax it out with the battery
disconnected i'm going to see if we can
remove it right away
batteries will eventually need to be
replaced in any device
so it's good to see how easy that is to
do
this one looks like it's held in place
with phillips screws
i'm going to swap out my torx bit for
what looks like
a phillips zero
that looks great these screws are a
sight for sore eyes
most macbooks and even other thin and
light laptops have
batteries that are glued in kk just
replaced
the battery in a 2015 macbook pro
and i think that took her two hours
and if this goes according to plan i
could have this one removed
in two minutes and
we should be good to go now let's see
oh my goodness yeah sweet
looks like along the bottom here there
is a
cable that connects the two speakers
that's kind of
routed along the battery it's taped in
place here i'm just going to
get rid of that tape
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there we go all right the battery's out
two minutes take that kk this battery is
surprisingly thin and light
it's rated at 56 watt hours and
hopefully that's good enough to get you
through a day next i'm going to go for
the speakers just because
they look easy
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and then you can just lift them out
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guess we should disconnect them
there we go speakers are out
next i'm going to pull these ram sticks
out these are
little sodium sticks you pull the arms
apart and then pull out the stick
these are four gigabyte sticks of course
you can configure that on dell's website
when you buy the machine
or since they are replaceable you can
just buy your own ram and put it in
i'm going to go for the ssd this is just
another phillips screw the heat shield
slides off of this little rail here
and underneath we see a
tiny m.2 drive with this little adapter
pull that out this is
a 256 gigabyte drive again configurable
and upgradeable so whatever you want you
know so far this laptop is really
impressing me
it's been a while since we've done a
teardown of a windows laptop
aside from the surface laptops which
i'll get to in a minute
but coming from apple laptops this is
astronomically better in terms of
repairability having all these
components accessible
right off the bat is great for the
longevity of the device because you'll
be able to upgrade or replace them
whenever you want
the surface laptops the latest ones
surface laptop 3
they actually do have replaceable ssds
but
the battery itself is glued in and still
really a pain to get to
i've only been working on this for like
20 minutes and i've already been able to
replace
almost every component that i could see
myself needing to replace within
the next four years so that is great for
the repair ability
the next thing i think i'm going to go
for is the fans they look like they are
just held in place with phillips screws
which is a recurring theme here great
now that everything is loose let's
disconnect these real quick
and we can pull them out
with the cooling system out of the way
we can see these empty die spaces on the
motherboard
those are there because you can equip
this laptop with a gpu
anything up to an nvidia gtx 1650 ti
with 4 gigabytes of ram before we get
the motherboard out though
we need to disconnect a few cables and
unscrew a few screws so let's do that
we'll start up here with these port
shields
it looks like the sd card reader is on a
separate board from the main board
which is actually a very good thing that
way if the
sd card reader dies then you only have
to replace this tiny board instead of
this huge board
and there is the little sd card board
you'll notice that a lot of things on
this motherboard
are actually labeled which is kind of
crazy
you can see a lot of these screw holes
have
tiny little words telling you what kind
of screw you will need for that hole
we've got battery label by this
connector over here cables are labeled
very nice stuff to see from dell we will
undo this keyboard connector
and then unscrew the display cable
bracket
i do want to mention that the display
which is another thing that
is likely to break over the lifetime of
this laptop
does look like it's replaceable right
off the bat as soon as you open the
laptop you don't
need to replace any of these other
components before you do that swap which
is really cool
looks like we also need to undo this
antenna bracket
there we go this motherboard is equipped
with a
intel core i5 10 308 processor
i mentioned the sd card reader is
replaceable on its own motherboard but
these three usb-c ports are not we're
getting to the bottom of the barrel here
next i'm going to go for the track pad
which is held in place with these
phillips screws
we're just going to get this antenna
wire out of the way real quick
and disconnect a cable
or two
just one
and there we go this trackpad is
actually
pretty gigantic it reminds me a lot of
the macbook track pads personally i
think they're too big
the last thing i'm going to take out
here is the display
to do that i'm going to take out the
screws on the hinges here
last one and
ta-da this would be replaced as a single
unit so if something were to go wrong
with the keyboard
you would need to do all of this
disassembly to get to the lower case
and then swap it out for a new keyboard
this is a 1080p
panel it does not have touch but you can
expect the machine to have up to a 4k
touch panel
these cables do look like they might be
integrated into the display like the
macbook cables which means
should one of the cables fail you may
have to replace the whole screen
with everything disassembled i'm still
really impressed by the dell xps 15.
the battery and the screen are
immediately replaceable as soon as you
open the lower case
the ram and the storage are upgradable
the only thing that i can see being a
downside
is this keyboard and uppercase assembly
they are
one unit so you can't replace the
keyboard by itself which is kind of a
bummer
and it takes quite a bit of disassembly
to get down to the unit
but all that said i can't give you a
score just yet
i need to go talk to the team i'll be
back in just one minute with the score
for you
hey it's me again it's been more than a
minute it's actually a couple days later
but
i am finally here ready to give the dell
xps 15 a score
it's earned a 9 out of 10 on our
repairability scale
with all that said i actually really
recommend this laptop it's got a 9 out
of 10 repairability score so you know
that it will last you for a long time
you will be able to replace
just about any component that you need
to over the lifetime of the machine
it turns out that the display is
actually modular you can lift up this
plastic
bezel and then another plastic cover
which will give you access to the
stretch release adhesive which will let
you remove the display all by itself so
you do not have to remove the whole
assembly
well that's it for this video if you
liked it give it a thumbs up
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see you in the next one
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you