Whenever a new Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) product is released, the folks at iFixit are among the first to tear apart that product. This time, iFixit has torn down Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s latest notebooks – the MacBook Pro Retina 13-inch and 15-inch model. Let’s take a ride and discover what Apple has in store for us, and whether it will be easy to repair new MacBooks or not.
The two most important elements of the MacBook Pro are that it comes with Intel’s fourth generation (Haswell) chips and a Retina display. Now you can forget the non-Retina 15″ MacBook Pro as Apple has stopped selling it. A combination of Apple’s OS X Mavericks with Haswell means that the company is confident in the reduced size of the battery (physically) in both products. In fact, Apple claims that the battery will deliver an extra hour of battery life with the same capacity cells.
Both the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro teardowns reveal that the battery is glued down to other components making it impossible to safely remove and replace. But that’s not all—the Cupertino company has used adhesive for many other components too making it harder to repair the MacBooks. The RAM and SSD drive is also soldered to the logic board which means it won’t be easier to replace them as well. It also means that in future, you won’t be able to upgrade your RAM.
Coming to the most important part – the repairability score by iFixit. Both the the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro have got a terrible 1 out of 10 repairability score (10 being the easiest to repair).
People can’t replace their headphone jack without replacing the logic board, as per iFixit. This means that unless you know soldering and tinkering around, a simple replacement of a headphone jack would now cost a whopping $1,000. Not good Apple, not good.
Check out the full teardown with images for the 13-inch and 15-inch model on iFixit, but you would come to only one conclusion—Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has made both the MacBook Pro’s extremely hard, nay, next to impossible to repair.