MacBook Pro 15-inch Touch Bar
Repair it? Not if Apple has a say...!
Apple announced a trio of new laptops in late 2016, and today we’re looking at the top of the line model with Touch Bar, which attempts to replace our tried-and-true function keys. It’s time to tear down the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar!
MAJOR TECH SPECS
15.4-inch LED-backlit Retina Display with 2,880 x 1,800 resolution (220dpi), P3 color gamut 2.6GHz Skylake quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz), with integrated Radeon Pro 450 with 2GB of GDDR5 16GB of 2,133MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory 256GB PCIe-based onboard SSD (configurable to 512GB, 1TB ≠ or 2TB SSD) 4 x Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports supporting charging, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, USB 3.1 Gen 2 Touch Bar with integrated Touch ID sensor Force Touch trackpad
KEY FINDINGS
On initial inspection, the 15-incher looks like a scaled-up version of the 13-inch model. We do notice a difference in the battery layout, but overall, it’s like looking at twins. We ran into a connector to nowhere, too. Apple may have included this to access the soldered-in SSD for data recovery. Honstly, we’d rather see a removable/upgradeable SSD in a machine targeted at pros — but this way, if your logic board bites the dust, there might at least be a chance of recovering your data. Anxious to get a peek at Apple’s re-engineered thermal architecture, we free the fans from the four T3 screws securing them to the rear case and they come out hassle-free. No glue on the outside, then, but opening up the fan takes some aggressive prying against clips and adhesive. This 15-inch Pro has a similar speaker grille to its smaller 13-inch brother. Most of the grille doesn’t include full through-holes, prompting us to question: why the dimples? Survey says: weight-savers, so it goes faster when you put wheels on it. After accidentally separating the digitiser from the OLED panel, we turn our tools to the LED display. Two teardown engineers, an opening pick, X-Acto knife, isopropyl alcohol, a heat gun and an iOpener all came to this OLED teardown party, but Apple’s adhesive was still too much for our glue separation squad. Thwarted by the monstrous amount of adhesive ≠ holding in the OLED panel in place, ≠ we resign ourselves to flecking away shards of glass. Repairability Score: 1 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair). The trackpad is easy to access and straightforward to replace. Use of proprietary pentalobe screws makes servicing and repair unnecessarily difficult. The entire battery assembly is strongly glued into the case, complicating replacement. The processor, RAM and flash memory are soldered to the logic board. The Touch Bar adds a second, difficult-toreplace screen to damage. The Touch ID sensor doubles as the power switch, and is paired with the T1 chip on the logic board. Fixing a broken power switch may require help from Apple ≠ or a new logic board.