© iFixitBattery removal took us roughly 15 minutes to complete, and we didn't have to use a heat gun. Listening for the snap, crackle, & pop of breaking adhesive, we cautiously pushed forward until all six cells were free. We made good progress initially, but things slowed down when we got to the outer cells and had to start slowly spudgering under the edges.

This time we're excited to find two of the six battery cells held in with screws and no adhesive.

Maxim MAX15119 Apple-specific IMVP7 CPU/GPU power controller.

Cypress Semiconductor CY8C24794-24L programmable SoC.

Texas Instruments Stellaris LM4FS1AH microcontroller with integrated ARM core.

But while these fans are pretty cool, they can't be removed without first taking out the heat sink, which means you'll have to reapply thermal paste to the CPU in order to perform the job properly. The asymmetrical blade spacing of the fans is great at breaking up annoying air patterns that symmetrically-spaced fan blades might generate. We'll see if a 7 mm or 5 mm super-slim hard drive could be incorporated into the space. Yet, our 9.5mm Crucial SSD didn't allow the bottom cover to be closed, but only by a smidge. Our first thought was that a standard 2.5' laptop drive might fit in the SSD space, and it almost looks like the little nook was designed with that in mind.

Their placement allowed Apple's designers to cleverly tuck the SSD away underneath the trackpad assembly. The most striking layout change in the 13' version is the rearranged battery cells.

From what we can surmise, the little PCB serves only as a bridge between the battery control board and the logic board. But wait, what's this? 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. Accordingly, it earned a 2/10 repairability score, a meager one point higher than its 15' sibling.Īs always, we start by disconnecting the battery, a simple task that requires no more than releasing a connector. The 13' Retina's design is a step in the right direction, but it's a very small step: the RAM is still not upgradeable, the exterior screws are still proprietary, and replacing the display will still cost an arm and a leg. It was definitely a doable feat (compared to nearly impossible for the 15' Retina), but still a far cry from the no-adhesive, non-Retina MacBook Pros. Once inside, it took us *only* 15 minutes of prying to remove the battery, and we didn't puncture the battery cells. The 13' MacBook Retina is slightly more recyclable than the 15' Retina. So, as we dove into the newest member of the Retina family, we were quite interested to see how the 13' model stacked up to its big brother. In the end, you have to take into account that old phrase of not judging by appearances, since these teams are much more than what meets the eye.Over the past couple of months, we've been pretty vocal about the MacBook Pro 15' Retina's shortcomings - specifically, its lack of repairability, upgradeability, and recyclability. The conclusion of iFixit and that we also share in this writing, is that in the end these apparent changes are small, but enough to see a sample of the fine work that Apple has been doing in these years and that in the future it will be seen more abruptly. To this must be added the security T2 chip that in this case is directly integrated into the M1. Something curious and that does not seem to have liked too much is that the integrated memory ( RAM) is difficult to repair without official Apple tools. Of course, this does not mean that for this reason the ventilation problems seen in previous generations are still present, since in the end the processor is totally different and it is already seeing a much better optimization than those that were with the Intel. The cooling design of the computer, including fans, is identical to the previous model. From the MacBook Pro it is recognized how complicated it was to differentiate it from the model with Intel, since in this team there are many more similarities than in the case of the ‘Air’.

2012 macbook pro teardown