Microsoft Surface Book proves painful to repair
A tour through the innards of Microsoft's new laptop is a challenging journey for the folks at iFixit, who found a lot of glue and a motherboard "resembling some kind of nightmarish Tetris piece."
Should you ever have the urge to open your Surface Book to try to fix a problem, resist it.
Released on October 26 to shake up the laptop market, Microsoft's Surface Book, has garnered generally good reviews for its solid design and powerful features. But a teardown published Monday from the folks at iFixit found the device a chore to take apart to access its array of internal parts.
In the event of a serious hardware problem, most laptop owners would never tear apart their device, instead relying on the vendor or a repair shop to do the hard labor. But the repairability of a tech product is important in that it tells us how well the manufacturer put all the internal parts together and how expensive the device may be to fix when it's no longer under warranty.
How did the Surface Book score on iFixit's repairability scale? It received a grade of 1 out of 10 (1 being the worst).
Keep in mind this is a slim laptop that can convert into a tablet via a detachable keyboard, so Microsoft had to squeeze a lot into a small package. The iFixit team found a variety of components glued or soldered on, making them difficult to remove. The processor and memory are both soldered to the motherboard. A strong adhesive is affixed to many components, including the display, base cover and both batteries. The base battery is "very heavily glued," according to iFixit, so removing and replacing it would not be an easy task.
Another "gotcha" is that many of the internal parts are located on the backs of their circuit boards, which means you have to remove the entire motherboard to replace them. Finally, the motherboard itself is inserted upside down and "sprawls throughout the entire chassis, resembling some kind of nightmarish Tetris piece," iFixit said. Just accessing the motherboard sounds like a battle not for the faint of heart.
The moral of the story? Don't try this at home.
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These hilarious tweets about the new Twitter hearts are real stars
While some people love Twitter's change of the fave icon, the switch has plenty of people annoyed. Here's what's in their hearts as #heartgate grows.
If you spend any time on Twitter, you probably noticed a lot of love on the site on Tuesday. Well, a lot of hearts anyway. A little red heart icon has usurped the familiar little yellow star iconused for expressing approval of others' 140-character musings.
Akarshan Kumar, a Twitter product manager, noted in a blog post that the star can confuse people (an assessment I, for one, find somewhat confusing). "The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones," Kumar said. "The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people."
The heart icon is now known as a Facebook-style "like," but does anyone really like it? By midday Tuesday, about 80 percent of the tweets on the topic expressed approval, according to social-media analysis platform Brandwatch. But we couldn't help but love the tweets from and about the haters. Here, we share some of the venting.
Oh, and if you happen to be a heart hater yourself, don't be too brokenhearted. As Mashable reports, there's already a way to bring back the stars. Gizmodo even has a tutorial for replacing the heart with the emoji of your choice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You only think you hate Twitter hearts because you haven't met the right tweet yet.
— L Johnston (@FinalBullet) November 4, 2015
Make the hearts black and I'll reconsider my position
— Silvia Killingsworth (@silviakillings) November 3, 2015
"I'm really angry that these little hearts have replaced little stars!!!" - adults
— elan gale (@theyearofelan) November 3, 2015
BREAKINGNEWZ: Jeb Bush has fallen behind Twitter Hearts in new poll.
— Woo Woo On You (@ThatElJefe) November 4, 2015
I insist the #hearts are changed to mini Death Stars. ❤️➡️ ➡️ ➡️ 🌐
— DarthVader_No1™ (@Burnt_Out_Darth) November 3, 2015
TWITTER DESIGNER: How about instead of stars we do hearts TWITTER CEO: As long as people can still swear at total strangers, idgaf
— pat tobin (@tastefactory) November 3, 2015
Me: Everything was going great until they started using hearts instead of stars. Therapist: Sam, I asked you about your kids.
— Sam Delanche (@samfromks) November 3, 2015
[extremely Werner Herzog voice] But what the Twitter men ignored was that no preponderance of hearts could alter the universe's cold apathy
— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) November 3, 2015
Twitter can turn stars to hearts but can't let us edit our tweets 😑
— KING DRE (@OfficialKingDre) November 3, 2015
If elected I will bring back stars #hearts
— Jeremey Corbyn (@jeremeycorbyn) November 3, 2015
Twitter is no place for hearts. It should remain a cold universe of stars. #heartsontwitter#heartgate
— Natalie Morin (@nbmorin) November 3, 2015
Favorites are now hearts? That's....lovely.. sorry, I'll stop.
— SSundee (@SSundee) November 3, 2015
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