News Surface Copilot+ PCs the most repairable ever — iFixit praises Microsoft's change in philosophy

[Admin]

The team at iFixit have bought their Microsoft Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7, and promptly disassembled them to show how repairable the latest tablet and laptop are.

Surface Copilot+ PCs the most repairable ever — iFixit praises Microsoft's change in philosophy : Read more

 

[JRStern]

Thank you, Microsoft!
Not often I get to say that.

 

[vijosef]

This is a wise and praiseworthy choice, that deserves acknowledgment, but still has some flaws:

• The model’s name is written at the bottom, where it wears away, making it impossible to identify the exact model after some time.
• To access the screws, it is necessary to remove the rubber feet, which never stick well back on and will fall off and get lost over time.
• Opening the enclosure requires a plastic nail, which always ends up breaking something.
• No upgradeable memory. I know that soldered is faster and consume less energy, but it should have free memory slots anyway.
• It lacks free expansion slots for more ssd and any other stuff.
• It is still a hassle to access upgradeable items like the SSD. Bring back direct access and replaceable batteries, even if it requires thicker laptops.

 

[DS426]

Thank you, Microsoft!
Not often I get to say that.

^ Same.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Soldered memory, the ultimate way to charge 4x the price of memory...

 

[Notton]

Soldered memory, the ultimate way to charge 4x the price of memory...

The M.2 NVMe is limited to 2230, so soldered memory would be the least of my worries.

Microsoft, thanks for copying Framework. We need more of this style of repairability.

 

[HideOut]

yes, but it does mean faster memory. As the New version of CAMM memory expands that'll help hopefully though

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

The M.2 NVMe is limited to 2230, so soldered memory would be the least of my worries.

Microsoft, thanks for copying Framework. We need more of this style of repairability.

Drive space shouldn't be much of a worry as long as you get a 512GB drive. Between USB drives and cloud/personal cloud storage that's plenty. The problem is from 16 to 32GB RAM is $400 and from 32GB to 64GB is -another- $400, so you can't just get the cheap 16GB version now and upgrade later for cheap.

 

[Notton]

Drive space shouldn't be much of a worry as long as you get a 512GB drive. Between USB drives and cloud/personal cloud storage that's plenty. The problem is from 16 to 32GB RAM is $400 and from 32GB to 64GB is -another- $400, so you can't just get the cheap 16GB version now and upgrade later for cheap.

We'll have to wait and see if any of the copilot+ features benefits from 32GB or 64GB of RAM, but 16GB is more than enough for Win11.

Drive space is a concern with 2230 drives, as they have poor TBW endurance compared to 2280 drives. It's a needless handicap for a device that had the physical space to use the larger size.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

We'll have to wait and see if any of the copilot+ features benefits from 32GB or 64GB of RAM, but 16GB is more than enough for Win11.

Drive space is a concern with 2230 drives, as they have poor TBW endurance compared to 2280 drives. It's a needless handicap for a device that had the physical space to use the larger size.

16GB is the -minimum- for Windows 11 to work smoothly without really anything open. I have 16GB used and the only main thing I have open is Outloook and Edge. Tack on something like Office or a game and it goes 24+ easy. To me 32GB is what people should be looking at as a true minimum in 2024.

 

[PiersPlowman]

16GB is the -minimum- for Windows 11 to work smoothly without really anything open. I have 16GB used and the only main thing I have open is Outloook and Edge. Tack on something like Office or a game and it goes 24+ easy. To me 32GB is what people should be looking at as a true minimum in 2024.

Unless you have scores of tabs open, there is something wrong with your system. An 8 GiB system can handle Outlook, a dozen Edge tabs, and Word on the go no problemo. Even on my 48GiB system, where W11 can stretch its wings, I have never seen that kind of RAM usage for everyday tasks. Only DaVinci Resolve really soaks up all the memory it can.

 

[mavroxur]

The M.2 NVMe is limited to 2230, so soldered memory would be the least of my worries.

Microsoft, thanks for copying Framework. We need more of this style of repairability.

You can get 2TB 2230 SSDs - is this really a concern for you?

 

[mavroxur]

16GB is the -minimum- for Windows 11 to work smoothly without really anything open. I have 16GB used and the only main thing I have open is Outloook and Edge. Tack on something like Office or a game and it goes 24+ easy. To me 32GB is what people should be looking at as a true minimum in 2024.

I'm not sure what you're doing but we have office machines with Win 11 using Office apps and browser based things on 8GB w/ SSDs and they're just fine. We only order machines with 16GB now but a lot of the machines that were Win10 previously and upgraded to Win11 have 8GB.

 

[BTM18]

My windows 11 PC is using 6 GB ram right now. Open tabs and streaming news.
If you really are using 16GB just browsing the web, then something is wrong.

 

[torka]

Cool! now MS just needs to remove the whole Copilot thing

 

[BTM18]

Cool! now MS just needs to remove the whole Copilot thing

Two clicks and its gone. Just did it. lol
Same with Edge. just a few clicks and poof.. no more copilot.

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

16GB is the -minimum- for Windows 11 to work smoothly without really anything open. I have 16GB used and the only main thing I have open is Outloook and Edge. Tack on something like Office or a game and it goes 24+ easy. To me 32GB is what people should be looking at as a true minimum in 2024.

Unless you have scores of tabs open, there is something wrong with your system. An 8 GiB system can handle Outlook, a dozen Edge tabs, and Word on the go no problemo. Even on my 48GiB system, where W11 can stretch its wings, I have never seen that kind of RAM usage for everyday tasks. Only DaVinci Resolve really soaks up all the memory it can.

I'm a software developer so I push my Windows 11 machine pretty hard 99% of the time. My usual workload includes Discord, Slack, 2 different Chromium-based (Brave) browser profiles with a multitude of tabs, Zoom, a WSL2 environment running Ubuntu, Docker, multiple VSCode windows, multiple Terminal tabs, and a number of running Docker containers including Localstack to emulate AWS and ~10 development containers to run our application stack during development. Even running all of that, I'm currently sitting at 16.6GB compressed RAM usage and 19.2GB committed RAM usage.

https://imgur.com/H40HiZm

Either you have serious bloatware running on your Windows 11 install or you're exaggerating to make Windows 11 seem like a resource hog, which it's really not.

 

[Notton]

16GB is the -minimum- for Windows 11 to work smoothly without really anything open. I have 16GB used and the only main thing I have open is Outloook and Edge. Tack on something like Office or a game and it goes 24+ easy. To me 32GB is what people should be looking at as a true minimum in 2024.

I don't understand how your system is eating up so much RAM.
Mine is floating at 11GB, and I have firefox playing youtube on one screen, while using chrome to browse on another.
Discord and Outlook barely use 800MB each, so I am using, at most, 14GB at any given time.

 

[KnightShadey]

Still don't understand the rabid defence of Low RAM amounts.

I've never heard anyone say " Oh, §h!¥ I've got TOO MUCH RAM! " or " It's Too Cheap ! "
Yet the "That's Crazy, YOU DON'T need that Much ! I use.... " argument is stated as if it were a law written on a stone tablet, instead of their personal sample size of 1 of many, even if you get a bunch of other 1 of many to agree with you.

Claims of " More than enough... " are naïve at best, especially when today's usage doesn't reflect tomorrow's , doubly so for features few of you have even used or unreleased products. Win10's minimums were 1/2GB 32/64bit , I guess they could never benefit from such exotic configurations as 8 or 16GB that's ridiculous, let alone something unthinkable like 32, 64, etc. 🙄

That thinking is far more egregious than thinking OEMs should set a higher minimum-bar for companies that already overcharge for memory, as if their customers were Apple customers paying $1k+ to go from 16GB to 32GB because of the forced SSD bundling.
Sure there are hardware design limits, but they last about one product cycle before they inevitably change those upper limits to; those change far faster than the "you only need" mentality. 😒

No one is keeping you from using less than your allotted/chosen memory, OEMs setting artificial hard limits, or practical pricing limits does keep other people from using what they require/desire.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm a software developer so I push my Windows 11 machine pretty hard 99% of the time. My usual workload includes Discord, Slack, 2 different Chromium-based (Brave) browser profiles with a multitude of tabs, Zoom, a WSL2 environment running Ubuntu, Docker, multiple VSCode windows, multiple Terminal tabs, and a number of running Docker containers including Localstack to emulate AWS and ~10 development containers to run our application stack during development. Even running all of that, I'm currently sitting at 16.6GB compressed RAM usage and 19.2GB committed RAM usage.

Then, just maybe......you need more RAM.
Gee.

In my system, 32GB was not enough. Had to bump up to 64GB.

A typical random user does not reach to that level.

You are not a typical user.

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

A typical random user does not reach to that level.

You are not a typical user.

That was my entire point. I'm not a typical user, and I barely use above 16GB RAM in my system. I was responding to the claim that Windows 11 uses 16GB RAM with only Outlook and Edge open. This is patently false, as I was able to demonstrate.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I'm a software developer so I push my Windows 11 machine pretty hard 99% of the time. My usual workload includes Discord, Slack, 2 different Chromium-based (Brave) browser profiles with a multitude of tabs, Zoom, a WSL2 environment running Ubuntu, Docker, multiple VSCode windows, multiple Terminal tabs, and a number of running Docker containers including Localstack to emulate AWS and ~10 development containers to run our application stack during development. Even running all of that, I'm currently sitting at 16.6GB compressed RAM usage and 19.2GB committed RAM usage.

https://imgur.com/H40HiZm

Either you have serious bloatware running on your Windows 11 install or you're exaggerating to make Windows 11 seem like a resource hog, which it's really not.

As I took this shot I had Edge and Outlook open, and in the background minimized to the system tray Discord, Steam, Razer Synapse, and other such things many people would have on their system, as you can see from the full process list the highest individual usage is the RAMMap program itself, no games, VMs, or other high usage items were in use. As you can see, the current usage less RAMMap would total a little over 16GB. About 7GB is private processes, the rest is various other things (paged/non paged pool, system PTE, etc). Task Manager makes it look even worse at 22GB.

So I stand by my original statement that 16GB should be considered the -minimum- for a modern Windows system,

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

As I took this shot I had Edge and Outlook open, and in the background minimized to the system tray Discord, Steam, Razer Synapse, and other such things many people would have on their system, as you can see from the full process list the highest individual usage is the RAMMap program itself, no games, VMs, or other high usage items were in use. As you can see, the current usage less RAMMap would total a little over 16GB. About 7GB is private processes, the rest is various other things (paged/non paged pool, system PTE, etc). Task Manager makes it look even worse at 22GB.

So I stand by my original statement that 16GB should be considered the -minimum- for a modern Windows system,

I maintain my statement. If you're using 22GB of RAM with only Outlook, Discord, and Steam open then you seriously need to consider what the heck else is on your machine. I have proven that under a much heavier workload that I am only using ~16GB of RAM on an up-to-date Windows 11 build.

With that said, I agree with the overall premise that 16GB should be the minimum for any sane Windows 11 build.