Watch iFixit tear down the new MacBook Pro and test Apple’s official repair guides

iFixit is well known for taking apart just about every new Apple product, as the company specializes in providing guides to third-party repairs. However, this time, iFixit decided to test the official Apple repair guides by taking apart the new 2023 MacBook Pro that was just released.

Is Apple’s repair guide intuitive? iFixit answers that

The teardown of the new MacBook Pro by itself doesn’t reveal many surprises. Except for the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, the new laptops are almost identical to their predecessors. But what’s really interesting about the latest iFixit teardown video is that the company followed the official repair guides provided by Apple to see if they’re easy to understand.

The guides are part of Apple’s self-service repair program, which provides users with the necessary tools to repair their own devices. The program covers most recent iPhone models as well as the entire lineup of M1 Macs. But since the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro have the same design as the previous generation, iFixit used the guides for the 2021 MacBook Pro models.

As noted by iFixit, Apple’s repair guides come with a lot of security warnings. After all, users are dealing with electronic components that can hurt someone or even fail depending on how the user handles it. But is Apple’s repair guide somewhat intuitive?

According to iFixit, Apple’s manual is “quite comprehensive and easy to follow.” But there’s one really intriguing thing about it, and that’s how Apple tells the user to drape the MacBook’s screen over the edge of a table so that the user never touches the battery during the repair. And when it comes to the repairability score, the 2023 MacBook Pro achieved 5 out of 10 since many parts are soldered to the logic board.

Slower SSD in the 2023 MacBook Pro

But before iFixit, 9to5Mac had already shown a look at the internal components of the 2023 MacBook Pro. And to our surprise, the base model with 512GB of storage has the same problem as the M2 MacBook Air with 256GB of storage, which is a reduced number of NAND chips for the SSD. While the 2021 512GB MacBook Pro has four NAND chips, the new one has only two. This led to the storage’s write and read speeds becoming dramatically slower.

Since models with higher storage capacities still have more than two NAND chips, they haven’t been affected by the reduction in SSD speed.

As for the iFixit teardown, you can watch the full video below or on YouTube:

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