The MacBook Pro with Retina Display is an impressive beast with a stunning screen and top-of-the-line computing innards. That said, it’s about as repairable as a used stick of gum per iFixit. The always vigilant DIY repair company just posted its notes after spending some time completely disassembling the new Apple MacBook Pro. But don’t expect to do the same with your new MBP. iFixit states “[The MacBook Pro with Retina Display] is, to date, the least repairable laptop we’ve taken apart.”
Apparently the new MacBook Pro is built like a MacBook Air and an iPad in that everything is custom and designed for the thinnest possible end product. The batteries are glued into place, the RAM is soldered to the logic board, it uses a custom SSD, and, worse yet, the screen assembly is all one piece, which means owners will need to replace the whole thing if something happens to any part of it.
This nonsense sort of signals the end to hometown Mac repair shops. Like the new iPad, Apple is designing products to be replaced rather than fixed. An Apple Store Genius will likely be replacing a whole lot more MacBook Pros on the spot rather than swapping out bad components. iFixit, champions of disassembling all the things, couldn’t even get the massive 94Wh battery removed from the case.
Comments about the non-repairable notebook aside, iFixit revealed the inner beauty of the new MacBook Pro. It’s hard to look at the pic of the entire assembly and not appreciate the sheer symmetrical wonder of the construction — just appreciate it from a far since you can’t fix anything anyway.
