... seriously? At this point it's beginning to feel like iFixit is selling out to these companies. Score of 7/10 and the RAM is soldered. That doesn't compute for me.
If the SSD is actually replaceable as the teardown indicates, that's a huge plus.
If the wifi/BT module is still integrated, that's a big fat minus, because those are the most likely parts that have failed on pretty much every iteration of the Surface and I'm sick and tired of seeing these insanely expensive and impossible to repair devices with parts that quickly fail.
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?
It’s not reasonable to expect that a tablet would ever provide modular RAM. It just doesn’t make sense for that form factor.
But LPDDR4X or LPDDD5? There are legitimate benefit to using low-powered RAM, and these aren't available in DIMM sticks.
Less weight, less cost, better long-term reliability... but one in a hundred thousand nerds get thwarted. Wearing my hardware-dev hat, I'm more than OK with that.
SSDs and external connectors definitely fail, though, and they should be repairable/replaceable.
With RAM, generally the ability to upgrade the capacity, which can extend the useful life of the device.
The point being that memory upgrades to increase capacity is really not important anymore due to capacity having stagnated for the most part.
I'm glad iFixit is considering the tradeoffs involved here.
We no longer have Solid Capacitor and they aren't even a repairing problem anymore. That goes the same with LPDDR.
If you tradeoff repairability for performance in the repairability metric, once you compare the repairability metric to the performance metric, you've double counted the performance
That 15 watt cpu? 10/10 performance because of the power draw!
That 45 watt cpu? 10/10 power draw because of the performance it provides!
1. carry around and do some coding on,
2. watching movies / studying and browsing,
3. drawing / taking notes.
Having to go through file save dialogs to close the drawing app just killed the joy for me.
This is probably for eMMC version with 4GB RAM. SSD version with 8Gb should be just fine your listed tasks.
[0] Microsoft SQ2 and SQ3 respectively, which in turn are binned and rebranded Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 and 3 respectively
Reads like onion. Its "modular" because motherboard is not glued to display and buttons ...
The only reason why I bought a Pro 7 was the UBs-C port that allowed charging so that another Bbocken connector wouldnt mean a death sentence.
Frustrating as i currently use an HP elite x2 tablet and make full use of the three usb-c ports (charging, tethering, and many times a keyboard) and headphone jack. It's fairly repairable too since its considered more of an enterprise-class device, sadly been discontinued afaik.
I really like the Dell Latitude 2-in-1 (tablet) as my Surface clone/replacement. It's held together by screws and it has had Thunderbolt for quite a while now!