Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Tinkerers at iFixit subjected Apple's new MacBook Pro (no Touch Bar) to a teardown

Mark Coppock
By

apple macbook pro no touch bar ifixit teardown
San Lionheart/iFixit
Every time a new device is introduced, the tinkerers at iFixit tear it down and peer into its guts to see exactly what it’s made of and how it’s constructed. As the industry has progressed toward thinner and thinner gadgets, iFixit quite often finds that a product is so tightly made that user — and often manufacturer — servicing is an utter impossibility.

Apple’s products are no different, and with the introduction of a refreshed MacBook Pro line, iFixit pulled out its screwdrivers and splitters and got to work on the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar. What they discovered is a machine that, as usual, is highly integrated and not terribly serviceable. As always, iFixit has published its entire report.

Recommended Videos

Overall, iFixit awarded the MacBook Pro a repairability score of 2 out of 10, which means that the machine certainly isn’t going to be fixed by anyone but the manufacturer. The score was lowered significantly based on Apple’s continued use of nonstandard pentalobe screws that make even opening the chassis a challenge. Also, the battery components are glued tightly to the case, making replacement difficult. RAM is directly soldered to the motherboard and thus won’t be upgradeable — if you think you’ll want the full 16GB at some point, buy it out the gate because it will be unattainable otherwise.

Related

The report notes that the PCIe SSD is removable, and so that’s a positive for anyone who might one day want to grab onto more storage. For now, it’s Apple-proprietary, so users will need to wait for either Apple to release upgrades — if ever — or hope that third-party drive makers can eventually adopt the new technology and produce their own upgrades. iFixit notes that this is the first use of Apple’s proprietary controller, and so it’s not certain that third-party options will make it to market.

macbook-pro-ssd
Sam Lionheart/iFixit
Sam Lionheart/iFixit

Other items of interest include a 54.5-watt battery that’s 27 percent smaller than the previous MacBook Air’s. However, this capacity is significantly larger than the MacBook Air with Touch Bar, which has a 49.2-watt battery. Clearly, making the new MacBook Air models so much thinner than their predecessors necessitated a real compromise in terms of battery life. Although Apple claims a similar 10 hours of wireless web browsing with the new models that’s equivalent to last year’s iterations, one can only imagine the longevity that could have been achieved if Apple had maintained a similar thickness.

macbook-pro-batteries
Sam Lionheart/iFixit
Sam Lionheart/iFixit

Otherwise, the teardown revealed no significant surprises. The MacBook Pro’s construction would appear to be up to Apple’s usual high standards, with tight tolerances and a solid build that perhaps contributed to the machine’s low repairability score. If you decide to pick up a new 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar, then you’ll be spending your money on a well-built but not terribly upgradeable thin and light notebook.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock
Computing Writer
Mark has been a geek since MS-DOS gave way to Windows and the PalmPilot was a thing. He’s translated his love for…
I needed to buy a new MacBook. Here’s why I bought a power bank instead
Baseus Blade 2 65W power bank for laptops kept on a green couch.

I rely on a 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2020 for most of my work. Despite its age and being a base variant model, it continues to stack up well against my expectations for all these years.

Since MacBooks are known for longevity, the fact that my MacBook Pro still holds up well a few years later shouldn't sound surprising. However, the first signs of aging recently arrived in the form of a warning about the battery's plummeting health. I was already dreading the idea of having to replace what was otherwise a perfectly good laptop.

Read more
Apple quietly backtracks on the MacBook Air’s biggest issue
The MacBook Air on a white table.

The new MacBook Air with M3 chip not only allows you to use it with two external displays, but it has also reportedly addressed a storage problem that plagued the previous M2 model. The laptop now finally has much faster storage performance since Apple has switched back to using two 128GB NAND modules instead of a single 256GB module on the SSD drive.

This was discovered by the YouTuber Max Tech, who tore down the entry-level model of the MacBook Air M3 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. In his tests, thanks to the two NAND modules, the M3 MacBook Air is nearly double faster than the M2 MacBook Air. Blackmagic Disk Speed tests show that the older M2 model with the problematic NAND chip had a 1584.3 Mb/s write speed, and the newer M3 model had 2108.9 Mb/s for the M3 model, for a 33% difference. In read speeds, it was 1576.4 Mb/s on the old model and 2880.2 Mb/s on the newer model.

Read more
Why this gaming laptop is the MacBook Pro’s biggest competition
An OLED HDR demo running on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14.

There's no other laptop quite like the MacBook Pro right now.

In particular, I'm talking about the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M3 Max under the hood. The way this laptop balances performance and portability just hasn't been seen before.

Read more