the last Microsoft Surface laptop
teardown was seriously destructive
resulting in a repair ability score of
zero out of ten today we have the new
thousand-dollar surface laptop - on our
teardown table and it doesn't look any
different than its older sibling but
only a tear down will tell what's
changed on the inside so here we go at
first glance
we're met with the infamous Alcantara
aka the fancy felt that keeps all the
sweat and dirt from your hands right at
your fingertips doesn't that sound nice
we grab our eye opener and bust out a
few pics to start carefully prying the
fluff away from the keyboard along with
some tough adhesive the Alcantara layer
is held in place by ultrasonic plastic
weld joints sounds cool but it's not we
might have done a better job of removing
the Alcantara this time but nothing
inside this thing is user replaceable or
upgradable since you have to break the
first layer to get inside with a little
more help from our opening picks we lift
the keyboard away from the back case and
pry off the shield protecting the
keyboard cable next we removed a shield
and a few screws to free the fan and
heatsink shields start popping off and
after removing a few Torx screws we were
able to free the speakers we tried to
remove the surface connect port next but
it turns out that you have to remove the
display to get to that port a few more
torque screws later and the display is
free this is a 13.5 inch pixel sense
display with a resolution of 20 256 by
1504 and a pixel density of 201 pixels
per inch the surface connect port comes
out next and there are a few screws and
cables left to remove on the motherboard
and then it lifts right out on the board
we find the Intel Core i5 processor
along with eight gigabytes of RAM and we
also spot 128 gigabytes of sk hynix
flash memory all soldered to the board
the battery is pretty much the only
thing left in the bottom case this is a
45 point 2 watt hour 5970 milliamp hour
battery which are the same specs as the
one in the first surface laptop the
Microsoft Surface laptop 2 was slightly
easier to tear down than the surface
laptop 1 but only because it hasn't
changed much here's why it scored a 0
out of 10 for repair ability while we
didn't damage the Alcantara this time
opening the device is still destructive
inhibiting any repairs modular
components like the headphone jack are
not easily accessed
the CPU RAM and onboard storage are
still soldered to the motherboard and
finally the battery is still difficult
to access and is severely glued in place
giving the device a limited lifespan
you