Last week we brought you news that iFixit, tore down the new retina display MacBook Pro to give us a look at what’s inside it. While the new MacBook Pro is unquestionably an amazing piece of technology, the teardown revealed some disturbing details about the computer’s repairability: the RAM is soldered to the logic board, the battery is glued into place, and the SSD is proprietary. That means that if you wanted to upgrade your RAM or replace your battery, you’d be out of luck, while upgrading the SSD will be expensive.
Not much was said in that review about the new MacBook Pro’s flagship feature: the retina display. Well, now we know why: it seems that iFixit was saving the retina display for a separate teardown, which they posted today.
Though they call the new retina display “an engineering marvel,” they nevertheless express concern about its lack of repairability. Like the rest of the MacBook Pro, the retina display gets ridiculously low scores for repairability. Not only was the placement of components odd, they found no way to get the LCD screen out of the frame without breaking it. Which means that if anything in your MacBook Pro’s retina display ever goes bad (e.g., the iSight camera), the whole thing – i.e., the entire top half of the computer – will have to be replaced. While there’s no word from Apple on how much they would charge for such a repair, but you can bet it won’t be cheap.
You can see some of the images from iFixit’s teardown below:
