As is their wont, as if their drive, the lovely boys over at iFixIt have already ripped apart the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro to check out the gooey silicon insides of Apple’s latest laptops.
As usual, there’s tons of pretty pictures of an intricate Apple product being vivisected. The highlights:
• “The most striking layout change resulting from the shrink from a 15″ to 13″ form factor is the rearranged battery cells. This allowed Apple’s designers to cleverly tuck the SSD away underneath the trackpad assembly.” It also makes the trackpad super easy to replace if it breaks compared to the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
• There’s an empty space next to the SSD drive, which iFixIt says is a “big air gap” and very un-Apple-like. They posit that a super-slim 2.5 HDD might fit in this space, which might mean that Apple once intended the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro to be cheaper, eschewing flash memory for a traditional hard drive.
• Intriguingly, the trackpad had flash memory.
Overall, the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro gets an iFixIt repairability rating of 2 out of 10, which makes it a smidge more self-serviceable than its larger brother, but not by much.
Source: iFixIt
