New MacBook Pro is near impossible to fix yourself
Apple鈥檚 new MacBook Pro with Retina Display is ridiculously fast and thin 鈥� but you can forget about ever taking it apart.
The repair gurus at聽聽this morning, and thanks to its plethora of non-upgradeable parts, they ended up giving Apple鈥檚 latest and greatest laptop a dismal repair score of 1 out of 10.
Apple had to squeeze plenty of hardware into the Retina MacBook Pro鈥檚 .71-inch thick frame, and just like the MacBook Air, the company had to sacrifice expandability in order to do so. IFixit notes that the new MacBook Pro鈥檚 RAM is soldered into the logic board, there鈥檚 a proprietary non-upgradeable SSD, and the battery is glued into the case (which means trouble if you ever try to disassemble the computer).
Perhaps the biggest potential issue, iFixit says the entire display assembly is fused, which means you鈥檒l have to replace the entire thing if any aspect of it fails. If you鈥檙e not under AppleCare, that will likely be a very expensive repair.
鈥淟aptops are expensive. It鈥檚 critical that consumers have the option to repair things that go wrong, as well as upgrade their own hardware to keep it relevant as new technologies roll out,鈥� wrote iFixit鈥檚 Kyle Wiens. 鈥淥n top of being glued together, the new MacBook Pro is virtually non-upgradeable 鈥� making it the first MacBook Pro that will be unable to adapt to future advances in memory and storage technology.鈥�
But aside from gadget geeks, I don鈥檛 think many consumers will care that this new MacBook Pro is practically impossible to repair. After all, the vast majority of buyers should never have to worry about fixing the computer on their own, and most would rather have a thinner laptop instead of one that catered to tinkerers. I鈥檓 a hardware geek myself, but I save my upgrading fetish for my self-built desktop 鈥� I don鈥檛 mind at all that my MacBook Air is basically a hermetically sealed magic box.
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