Enlarge / The guts of the Surface Studio laid out to examine. (credit: iFixit)

In their bid to determine how repairable and upgradeable things are, the people at iFixit have thoroughly disassembled and beautifully photographed Microsoft’s new all-in-one desktop, the Surface Studio.

It’s not a tremendous surprise to learn that the machine is full of soldered-down parts with a custom motherboard; this isn’t a regular ATX PC, after all, and Microsoft has not designed it to be end-user serviceable. Accordingly, the processor, GPU, and RAM are all soldered down; if you buy the system with its base 8GB of RAM, that’s all it’s ever going to have.

The gorgeous 4500×3000 28-inch display is all but a completely sealed unit, too, though it’s packed with touch screen sensors, cameras, speakers, and even its own dedicated ARM processor. The only saving grace is that, should you damage the screen, it appears that the entire unit can be replaced easily. This is unlikely to come cheap, mind you, as the screen is far and away the most expensive component of the entire system.