Apple devices aren’t the most repairable electronics in the world, but the company is making a few moves to fix that across iPhones and other product lines. The new M4 MacBook Pro laptops aren’t any easier to repair, though.
iFixit just uploaded its teardown of the new MacBook Pro that were just launched with the new M4 range of chips. What do we have here? Well, really nothing new. Putting it side by side to an M3 MacBook Pro, it’s really 95% the same. There’s a slightly larger heatsink and some components have moved around, but for the most part, it’s the exact same thing—the battery mount is identical, and so is the way you put the laptop apart. It’s just distinct enough to break the ability for you to fully use salvaged parts from previous gen models, but not so that you’ll actually notice a difference.
This is not really surprising. These MacBook Pro laptops are really the epitome of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra, because they’re really similar to the M3 MacBook Pro models. There are some obvious differences, such as the CPU being better, and some not so obvious differences, like Apple quietly adding a quantum dot display to the newer models. But other than this, it’s the same old MacBook you’ve come to know and appreciate.
The minimal upgrade in both hardware design and the actual hardware isn’t awful, but it does leave us yearning for a more exciting revamp like what Apple did with the Mac mini. The new Mac mini has swappable and potentially upgradeable storage, for one—when was the last time you saw a Mac that didn’t have a soldered SSD?
Perhaps we’ll get more improvements in future generations, but for now, the MacBook Pro is mostly unchanged both outside and inside.
Source: iFixit
