Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the unveiling of the Surface Pro 3 at an event in New York on May 20, 2014.

At Microsoft's annual hardware event in October, product chief Panos Panay wanted to show the audience just how easy it is to repair the company's new laptop. Pacing the stage while holding a Surface Laptop 3, Panay lifted the keyboard case right off the device, revealing removable storage and internal parts held together with simple magnets instead of unwieldy adhesive.

The audience cheered. It was a big moment for Microsoft, whose Surface devices have been panned for years for being difficult for consumers and service providers to fix, relative to rival devices from Dell and HP.

"Being able to repair and service a product without at all impacting any of the beauty of that, and the elegance, is critical," Panay told the crowd of Microsoft enthusiasts and employees.

Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker and second-most valuable publicly traded U.S. company, only gets 5% of revenue from devices. But the company has been busy reinvigorating the line with new chip options and new devices, like the two-screened Surface Neo that will run a forthcoming variant of Windows.

When people spend $1,000 on a laptop, the price of a Surface Laptop 3, they'd generally prefer to keep their maintenance costs down. That's been a weakness for Microsoft, whose two prior Surface laptops both received "repairability scores" of zero out of 10 from iFixit, a company that sells repair equipment and rips apart gadgets to reveal their guts. The Surface Pro detachable tablets were given scores of one and two over the years by iFixit, and the Surface Pro 7 tablet, announced in October, received a one.

Weeks after the October unveiling of the Laptop Surface 3, iFixit recognized what Panay was showing off, coming out with a score of five. A month later, iFixit gave the Surface Pro X tablet, featuring a Qualcomm chip, a six and said it was "cautiously optimistic" about the device "since ripping into the Surface Laptop 3." It was the highest score yet for a Microsoft-branded desktop, laptop or tablet.