The gang at iFixIt, which tears down tech products to look at their innards, has released a “teardown” of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.
As Apple’s second OLED-equipped device, the Touch Bar MBP also shares some family ties with the Apple Watch. iFixIt found two custom Apple chips right where the Touch Bar interfaces with the logic board. Presumably one of these is the T1 processor powering the Touch Bar. Teardown highlights include:
The MacBook’s speaker grilles don’t actually cover the speakers—and the grille holes aren’t even holes. They’re mostly cosmetic dimples (with a few tiny holes reserved for a pair of tweeters). Instead, the sound is directed through vents on the sides of the computer and into your earholes.
With MagSafe gone, a wayward step on the power cord is more likely to damage your ports—so, it’s heartening to see USB-C hardware that can be replaced separately (even if you have to remove the logic board to get to it), according to the folks at iFixIt. While these boards look identical, somewhere along the line, the left USB-C ports get Thunderbolt 3 supercharged.
Unlike its escape-key-containing kin, the Touch Bar-bearing MBP doesn’t have a removable SSD. In fact, the processor, RAM, and flash memory are all soldered to the logic board. You can replace your trackpad and headphone jack easily—but that’s pretty much it. Everything else requires removing the logic board. Plus, the added (fragile) glass of the Touch Bar is difficult to remove, landing this laptop a 1/10 on the iFixIt repairability scale.
