The brave souls at ifixit.org ripped apart the new MacBook Pro that Planet Earth has been raving about since Apple announced their newest laptop (with now-legendary retina display) and found something startling.
“This is, to date, the least repairable laptop we’ve taken apart,” the ifixit.org team announced in a June 13th blog post, just a few days after the official announcement at Apple’s annual developer’s conference.
The folks at ifixit.org (kind of like Will It Blend, without the blender….and with the ability to put things back together) pried apart the new MacBook Pro to find that it going to be really hard to fix, ,should anything go wrong. The full details of the teardown are here, but the basic theme of their findings is as follows:
- special screws proprietary to Apple are impossible to remove without a special tool
- key parts (RAM, Battery) are fixed into place with either no way to remove or upgrade, or fixed in such particularly perilous way (the battery is glued to the case, rather than screwed into)
- display assembly is fused together with no opportunity to fetch something dropped in.
They gave it a 1/10 score in terms of repairability, stating “the new MacBook Pro is virtually non-upgradeable—making it the first MacBook Pro that will be unable to adapt to future advances in memory and storage technology.”
Photo Credit: Computer Repair from Big Stock Photo
Apple wants people to buy new computers not upgrade older models so this is no surprise. While not something I like, considering how few mac users would upgrade an old computer rather than buying the shiny new one this is a moot point.