Apples Retina Macbook Pro teardown reveals shocking details

The new Retina Macbook Pro looks very nice from the outside, but not so when you dive into the inside. By that I mean Apple made this Macbook the toughest Apple product to repair or add on to. If you plan on purchasing a low-end model retina display Macbook than you might want to add as much RAM as you’ll need to start. The RAM is actually soldered onto the logic board, so your not going to be able to make an upgrade.

Another problem within the Macbook was the battery. Instead of the usual screwed in battery, it was glued into place. Unless you plan on replacing the battery or attempting to fix the trackpad it shouldn’t be a problem though.

That’s all the negatives of the teardown, now lets get dirty with all the nice new hardware. First is the 512 GB of Samsung flash memory(Pictured up top) . The solid state drive was ”similar but not identical to the one in the air,” according to iFixit.

The battery is found to be 95 Wh at 10.95 V compared to last year’s 77.5 Wh. This is good for around 7 hours of battery life, the same as last year. The number is only the same because much more power is needed to power the retina display.

Broadcom chips are used in the new Macbook Pro’s too. The Broadcom BCM4331 single-chip 802.11n dual-band wireless solution powers the Wi-fi; And the Broadcom BCM20702 is used to power Bluetooth 4.0 capabilities.

On the logic board includes: (All pictured below)

• NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M GPU
• Intel Core-i7 3720QM 2.6 GHz processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.6 GHz) with Intel Graphics HD 4000.
• What appears to be an Intel E208B284 Platform Controller Hub
• Hynix H5TC2G83CFR DDR3L SDRAM

Intel DSL3510L Thunderbolt controller

And in the end due to the non-up-gradable RAM and overall horrible upgrade process this computer was rated a 1/10 in Repairability by iFixit. They reasoned that the, “Proprietary pentalobe screws prevent you from gaining access to anything inside,” and that the SSD isn’t upgradable. Overall I know where they are coming from. If I purchase a computer they should make the process easy and upgradable. Apple wants consumers to buy another computer from them when they want to upgrade, not upgrade manually so it’ll last 10 years.

What do you guys think, the teardown was cool, but the non-upgradable hardware is TRASH!