April 30, 2024

iFixit Posts 13-Inch Retina Display MacBook Pro Teardown

Posted October 25, 2012 at 4:21pm by iClarified · 15371 views
iFixit has performed a teardown of the new 13-inch Retina Display MacBook Pro.

Apple just expanded their Retina family. The newest bundle of joy: a 13'' MacBook Pro with Retina display. It's small, it's sleek, and all those pixels are pretty darn snazzy. What goes best with a new gadget? Yep, you guessed it: kittens.* So, for this teardown, we brought in the the big guns.

Highlights:
● Instead of the good ol' run-of-the-mill battery connector that we've seen in most other Apple laptops, the battery is connected using several screws that hold a connector board in place.
● SSD is under the trackpad. 9.5mm Crucial SSD didn't allow the bottom cover to be closed, but just by a smidge. We'll see if a 7 mm or 5 mm super-slim hard drive could be incorporated into the space.

MacBook Pro 13" Retina Display Repairability: 2 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)
● There appears to be enough space to fit a regular 5 mm or 7 mm 2.5" laptop drive, but a custom cable will need to be developed.
● The battery is still glued into the laptop's top case, but it's slightly less difficult to remove compared to the 15" model.
● Proprietary pentalobe screws prevent you from gaining access to anything inside.
● The RAM is surface-mount soldered to the logic board, so no upgrade is possible. It will forever have 8 GB of RAM.
● The display assembly is almost impossible to take apart. If anything ever fails inside the display, you'll need to replace the display as a whole.

Take a look at the full teardown at the link below...

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