Glueing Products to Death

The lack of repairability is one of the main problems forcing consumers to unnecessarily dispose electronic devices – often way before their life expectancy…

The battery of my Surface Book 2 was weakening and even causing some hardware issues. The battery life in use was around half of what it was originally. One hardware issue was that the battery sometimes suddenly dropped to 0% when activating the discrete graphics card in the keyboard (probably due to a high inner resistance causing a high voltage drop). Another issue was that bellow around 50% the battery started to drop unpredictably.

So, I decided to replace it. I mean how hard can it be. 😅
(with a bachelor in mechanical engineering and a repair kit from iFix it)

It only took me 2 full hours and an absurd amount of heating (to loosen the glue) and prying to detach the back panel from the keyboard …and also praying not to damage the battery and starting a fire in my room. 😬

Looking at the batteries, I am just surprised that they did not explode – some luck was definitely involved!

The best part: Around the battery there is around 12mm of free space from the boarder …that could have been easily used to screw the backplate to the keyboard instead of going to NASA to request their strongest glue. No joke, this adhesive is really something. I am pretty sure that even Microsoft does not want to ever open up a Surface Book again.

Instead of just being mad and complaining, I thought it would be funny to convert my Surface Book 2 to include screws – since there is already space and I got principles to defend.

I 3D printed some brackets that hold inserts with an M2 thread. Then I drilled some holes into the emptiness of the boarders and neatly shoved the inserts into the frame.

This is the end result. So f*** you Microsoft for not doing this in the first place. Or should I say „screw you“ 😆 …sorry for that joke. Especially because the excessive gluing is totally not necessary due to the following reasons:

• It does not make this particular product lighter
• It does not make this particular product slimmer
• There is more than enough space to incorporate it in the design
• You are using absolutely poor battery quality which makes your „premium products“ literarily a peace of junk.

The funniest thing about this project is: I will probably never ever again open up my Surface Book. Soooo, this was a waste of time then? Maybe yes, but I can confidently say, I slept much better after this and am pretty happy with myself 😉

Cheers