Surface Laptop 3 no longer a nightmare to tear down, iFixit finds

Surface Laptop hasn’t exactly had a great track record when it comes to “repairability,” but iFixit’s new teardown of the Surface Laptop 3 shows that times are changing.

Given Surface chief Panos Panay went out of his way to point out how easy the Surface Laptop 3’s guts are to access at this year’s Surface launch event, that’s not a huge surprise. However, given iFixit previously rated the Surface Laptop as the least repairable laptop on the market, it’s a big step forward.

As we saw this week with a post from an enterprising Redditor, the Surface Laptop 3’s base is largely held together by four Torx screws that live underneath the laptop’s feet. Once those are removed, you can detach the keyboard and upper case, which are held in place with magnets.

While you can’t replace everything inside the Surface Laptop 3, it does feature several modular parts. Those include the speakers, as well as the headphone jack and SSD drive.

Summing things up, iFixit gave the Surface Laptop 3 a “repairability” score of five out of 10. Here’s how they summed things up:

Based on its superficial similarity to past Surface Laptop designs, we would have expected something completely non-serviceable. Instead, the 3rd-generation Surface Laptop has swerved confidently into a better, more repairable direction.

Some of the modular components are still pretty difficult to access, and the battery looks to be a nightmare to remove without any adhesive tabs. However, it appears the Surface Laptop 3 is miles ahead of its predecessors.