The Touch Bar MacBook Pro teardown: Nearly impossible to repair
Remember when you could open up your MacBook Pro yourself and change the disk, add more RAM or replace the battery?
Those days are long gone. The folks at iFixit have torn down the 13.3-inch, Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pro, and found out that the device is extremely hard to repair on your own.
Besides being full of proprietary pentalobe screws, the new MacBook Pro has a battery that's glued to the case, and its processor, RAM and SSD are soldered to the logic board.
Add to that the Touch Bar, which further complicates repairs, and you basically have no reason to ever open this MacBook Pro. The only thing you can hope to replace on your own is the trackpad, which appears to be the same as on the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro (also known as the Escape Edition, as it has a dedicated Escape key), and is removable without prying out the battery first.
Sorry, DIY folks, if this thing gets broken, you pretty much have to bring it back to Apple for repairs.
The teardown also revealed a few other interesting tidbits about the device. Although it has the same dimensions as the 13-inch Escape Edition, its design is quite different on the inside, with a visibly smaller battery, two fans instead of one and several non-removable flash memory chips instead of one, removable SSD.
Perhaps the weirdest design decision on the Touch Bar MacBook Pro are its speaker grills, which don't line up with the speakers at all.
Check out the full teardown here.
Topics MacBook
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
