10 ms·

Teardown of the 14″ MacBook Pro M2 with Apple’s Help

168 points by transpute 4y ago

Waterluvian 4y ago
Apple is being credited with providing self service repair resources. Shouldn’t we also be crediting the regulations (or threat of regulations) that’s forcing them to behave better? I’m not convinced Apple came to the conclusion that it ought to do this for business reasons.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  I also find it interesting that these gestures start to happen when user hardware upgrades have become all but impossible anyway, and the difference between the 8GiB and 32GiB models can be upwards of $1000.
- foepys 4y ago
  Especially since Lenovo had full disassembly and replacement instructions for quite a few (all?) ThinkPads for years now. There maybe others but Lenovo is the one I know about. Just last week I upgraded the memory in mine, no repair kit required, just a simple screwdriver.
  - raisin_churn 4y ago
    I've been fixing ThinkPads since the IBM days (my first laptop was a 770x), and I seem to recall reasonable documentation having been available then, too. Or it's possible that it was just so easy to do the most common things (eg separate labeled RAM covers set into the bigger bottom cover) that I never even bothered looking for repair docs and I'm conflating their availability with their lack of necessity.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to consumer. I've used a (presumably leaked) 2008 MacBook Pro 15" service guide to disassemble, mend the bent case (due to a bad fall), change the hard drive with a SSD, and put my machine together.
    - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
      > All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to consumer. I think this is unfair, because precisely what the OP is saying is that in e.g. Lenovo products these instructions have been readily available for customers, sometimes even in the very product manual itself. I have an HP tablet from around 5 years ago where the disassembly instructions came with the printed manual. Also, it requires about 3 tools only, all of which are so standard that except for a suction cap I think they are almost in every household. Compare to this teardown of a much thicker laptop... even for replacing just the battery, I wouldn't have the tools, much less the balls to do it. It's not a surprise that iFixit still gives them a rather low "5" score.
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        I don't think I'm being unfair to OP, because I'm not putting a counterargument on the table. I just say that these guides are always produced, but not generally made available to consumers, and that's bad. I wish every electronic equipment is shipped with a User's Guide and Service Manual out of the factory. However, both to protect service businesses and due to more integrated nature of newer devices, self-service is becoming more impractical every day. Hope right to repair changes that for the better. Also, there was an Ask HN about "Declination of Everything", and people objected vehemently. Why we are having this debate now, if nothing is declining?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - titzer 4y ago
    There are some Lenovo models with RAM soldered into the logic board. I have one. It's a brick now because the memory started failing.
- madsbuch 4y ago
  This is being mentioned in the end of the video. They also only get a 5 out of 10 in their repairability score.
- webmobdev 4y ago
  Yeah, let's not lose sight of how the right-to-repair movement made this possible. And we still have long way to go as even iFixit notes: > There is of course the elephant in the room: parts pairing. As it stands, despite the increasingly repairable designs, the software locks that Apple maintains will result in waste as otherwise-useful components end up in landfills instead of being repurposed. The useful life of our devices will also be limited to Apple’s hardware support—whatever they decide that may be. Once support is dropped for a device, those software locks will remain in place which means even if a third-party manufacturer is willing to step in with replacement parts, those parts may be restricted in functionality. > It took us 20 years to get these manuals ...
- brookst 4y ago
  Do motives matter? I’m hard pressed to think of a company doing the right thing for noble reasons rather than profit motive.
throwanem 4y ago
Wild that the same company makes a critical material for Apple silicon, and the dashi broth base in my pantry...
- FearlessNebula 4y ago
  Which company and which critical material?
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Ajinomoto, who make [1] the "ABF substrates" mentioned in the article's discussion of DRAM selection for the M2 SOC, and also "HonDashi" and apparently many other brands of foodstuffs. [1] https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/action/buildupfilm https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/action/buildupfilm
- bitwize 4y ago
  Mitsubishi makes cars, electronics, cameras (Nikon), heavy machinery, and... canned tuna?! (Actually they spun off their canned food division a few years back under the name Ace of Diamonds, which was then snapped up by some Thai company for a song. Nevertheless...) Japanese keiretsus are weird, man. In Japan, 7-Eleven does banking.
cebert 4y ago
My biggest complaint about Apple and self repair is that it’s nearly impossible to upgrade RAM or storage on the new Apple Silicon macs. This allows Apple to charge high prices on upgrades. Additionally, I would argue that it lowers the expected life of the device as you have no ability to upgrade in the future.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment. An 16 GB MacBook Pro can live as a development machine (at least for what I develop) for almost a decade, so getting a 64G machine today will not make it obsolete for me till the machine itself dies. Also, an 16GB MacBook is pretty enough for running a lot of applications, incl. Electron based hogs. MacOS manages its memory pretty well.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment. Neither RAM nor SSD is embedded in the SoC. The RAM is just soldered on the package. While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      You're right about RAM, that's my mistake. I never implied that they also embedded SSD into the SoC. I just said that they may have tried to minimize path lengths. As an old overclocker, I don't believe that this compact soldering is only due to motherboard footprint. It would allow them greatly push the RAM chips to their limits.
    - bonsaibilly 4y ago
      > While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint. Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first place. There’s no such thing as a pluggable LPDDR5 stick; the design decisions around low voltages & high signaling rates make it physically impractical to survive the longer traces and discontinuities involved in the signal traversing a connector.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Maursault 4y ago
> After 2021's mind-blowing release of Apple M1 Silicon [sic], we're left a little bit underwhelmed with this year's nominal performance bump in the M2 Pro and M2 Macs chipsets. From time immemorial, Apple's new releases have only ever had incremental performance gains from the previous release of whatever model. It has always been this way, and it is true of the M1 and of the M2. What is mind-blowing about M1 is its efficiency, and that Apple switched platforms seamlessly while still incrementally increasing CPU performance. I don't understand why anyone expects things to change and to see a massive increase in performance at every model refresh when that has never ever happened. Yet at every new Apple release, there's always this disappointment from pundits and people who should know better that the new machine isn't exponentially more performant than the last model. What is causing this?!
- ajconway 4y ago
  But M1 did provide fundamental increase in performance. It had only 4 performance cores, yet it could build my code 1.5 times faster than the mightiest i9 of the time.
  - merb 4y ago
    tbf the mightiest i9 mobile chip at the time was pretty bad, thermal wise and throttled extremly fast, besides that it was basically offered for ultrabooks... I mean the m1 did draw only half or even less power than the mightiest i9 mobile chip at the time (and still does lol)
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    The M1 is fast for a few reasons: * It uses a fabrication process that noone has gotten their hands on yet. These have always been massive jumps, and giving access to that node to AMD and Intel gets them to similar performance (actually, they already are at similar performance with the same gen). * You're buying an un-upgradeable SoC. Soldered on everything means fast interconnect, while others have to play ball with standards that allow me to change components whenever I want. * It's a pretty damn good CPU. So, out of these three, Apple is responsible for 1/3. Dump an i9 on a SoC with a 3nm process and it'll eat the M1 alive. There's no "fundamental" increase.
conorh 4y ago
I'm going through the Apple self repair process currently and it has been excellent. I spilled coffee that managed to get inside my Mac Studio (via the front ports) and it stopped powering up. I downloaded the self repair manual and followed the instructions to disassemble it; found coffee on the power supply which may have caused the problem. I ordered a replacement power supply from the very well organized self repair order site. I was also happy to see that they promote recycling by giving you a good amount of money back if you send the old parts in. I'll find out on Monday if my theory about the power supply is correct :) I don't know how much of this is due to the new regulations, but it has been a very smooth process.
- cyberlurker 4y ago
  This is incredible and the first time I have ever heard of money for returning old, damaged parts.
  - commoner 4y ago
    In the automotive industry, replacement auto parts are often sold with a deposit called a core charge that is refunded when the old part is returned to the seller. https://www.bar.ca.gov/arsc/newsletters/newsletter/fall-2021/core-charges-explained https://www.bar.ca.gov/arsc/newsletters/newsletter/fall-2021...
  - tencentshill 4y ago
    It’s quite common for cell phone repair shops to send the damaged screens back for a buyback. They can reuse a lot of good OEM components on a display assembly.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- wackget 4y ago
  Usually with liquid damage it's possible to clean and dry the component thoroughly using isopropyl alcohol and it can work again. Did you give that a try?
popol12 4y ago
I like that the guy talking about the macbook has a framework laptop on his desk
anonymouse008 4y ago
> We spend a lot of time criticizing Apple for their anti-consumer practices like monopolizing its repair ecosystem with parts pairing, engaging in psychological obsolescence, and lying to congress—among many examples of poor corporate behavior—but here’s one thing they’re finally doing that shows a lot of promise— the Self Service Repair program. Whoever was on this team at inception and whoever is still running it today - you are an ember of what made Apple, Apple. Thank you sincerely. Truly, you all should be expert witnesses to the antitrust cases to show what exactly it takes to do what everyone is expecting to ‘happen overnight’ done excellently.
adolph 4y ago
Did Apple just Sherlock iFixit?
olliej 4y ago
“Psychological obsolescence” is a new one. Now it’s wrong for Apple to even release new products??
- traviswt 4y ago
  How dare they make a product I want to buy!
brundolf 4y ago
I appreciate the work that ifixit does, but they often have this tone that's just dripping with cynicism/snark, and for me it's really off-putting We get it, you don't like companies that don't make the most repairable products. It gets a little tiring

168 points by transpute 4y ago

Apple is being credited with providing self service repair resources. Shouldn’t we also be crediting the regulations (or threat of regulations) that’s forcing them to behave better? I’m not convinced Apple came to the conclusion that it ought to do this for business reasons.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I also find it interesting that these gestures start to happen when user hardware upgrades have become all but impossible anyway, and the difference between the 8GiB and 32GiB models can be upwards of $1000.
foepys 4y ago
Especially since Lenovo had full disassembly and replacement instructions for quite a few (all?) ThinkPads for years now. There maybe others but Lenovo is the one I know about. Just last week I upgraded the memory in mine, no repair kit required, just a simple screwdriver.
- raisin_churn 4y ago
  I've been fixing ThinkPads since the IBM days (my first laptop was a 770x), and I seem to recall reasonable documentation having been available then, too. Or it's possible that it was just so easy to do the most common things (eg separate labeled RAM covers set into the bigger bottom cover) that I never even bothered looking for repair docs and I'm conflating their availability with their lack of necessity.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to consumer. I've used a (presumably leaked) 2008 MacBook Pro 15" service guide to disassemble, mend the bent case (due to a bad fall), change the hard drive with a SSD, and put my machine together.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    > All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to consumer. I think this is unfair, because precisely what the OP is saying is that in e.g. Lenovo products these instructions have been readily available for customers, sometimes even in the very product manual itself. I have an HP tablet from around 5 years ago where the disassembly instructions came with the printed manual. Also, it requires about 3 tools only, all of which are so standard that except for a suction cap I think they are almost in every household. Compare to this teardown of a much thicker laptop... even for replacing just the battery, I wouldn't have the tools, much less the balls to do it. It's not a surprise that iFixit still gives them a rather low "5" score.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      I don't think I'm being unfair to OP, because I'm not putting a counterargument on the table. I just say that these guides are always produced, but not generally made available to consumers, and that's bad. I wish every electronic equipment is shipped with a User's Guide and Service Manual out of the factory. However, both to protect service businesses and due to more integrated nature of newer devices, self-service is becoming more impractical every day. Hope right to repair changes that for the better. Also, there was an Ask HN about "Declination of Everything", and people objected vehemently. Why we are having this debate now, if nothing is declining?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- titzer 4y ago
  There are some Lenovo models with RAM soldered into the logic board. I have one. It's a brick now because the memory started failing.
madsbuch 4y ago
This is being mentioned in the end of the video. They also only get a 5 out of 10 in their repairability score.
webmobdev 4y ago
Yeah, let's not lose sight of how the right-to-repair movement made this possible. And we still have long way to go as even iFixit notes: > There is of course the elephant in the room: parts pairing. As it stands, despite the increasingly repairable designs, the software locks that Apple maintains will result in waste as otherwise-useful components end up in landfills instead of being repurposed. The useful life of our devices will also be limited to Apple’s hardware support—whatever they decide that may be. Once support is dropped for a device, those software locks will remain in place which means even if a third-party manufacturer is willing to step in with replacement parts, those parts may be restricted in functionality. > It took us 20 years to get these manuals ...
brookst 4y ago
Do motives matter? I’m hard pressed to think of a company doing the right thing for noble reasons rather than profit motive.

throwanem 4y ago

Wild that the same company makes a critical material for Apple silicon, and the dashi broth base in my pantry...

FearlessNebula 4y ago
Which company and which critical material?
- throwanem 4y ago
  Ajinomoto, who make [1] the "ABF substrates" mentioned in the article's discussion of DRAM selection for the M2 SOC, and also "HonDashi" and apparently many other brands of foodstuffs. [1] https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/action/buildupfilm https://www.ajinomoto.com/innovation/action/buildupfilm
bitwize 4y ago
Mitsubishi makes cars, electronics, cameras (Nikon), heavy machinery, and... canned tuna?! (Actually they spun off their canned food division a few years back under the name Ace of Diamonds, which was then snapped up by some Thai company for a song. Nevertheless...) Japanese keiretsus are weird, man. In Japan, 7-Eleven does banking.

cebert 4y ago

My biggest complaint about Apple and self repair is that it’s nearly impossible to upgrade RAM or storage on the new Apple Silicon macs. This allows Apple to charge high prices on upgrades. Additionally, I would argue that it lowers the expected life of the device as you have no ability to upgrade in the future.

bayindirh 4y ago
On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment. An 16 GB MacBook Pro can live as a development machine (at least for what I develop) for almost a decade, so getting a 64G machine today will not make it obsolete for me till the machine itself dies. Also, an 16GB MacBook is pretty enough for running a lot of applications, incl. Electron based hogs. MacOS manages its memory pretty well.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > On the plus side, embedding RAM into SoC is one of the magic tricks of Apple for such massive performance, due to short path lengths. I assume SSD got a similar treatment. Neither RAM nor SSD is embedded in the SoC. The RAM is just soldered on the package. While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    You're right about RAM, that's my mistake. I never implied that they also embedded SSD into the SoC. I just said that they may have tried to minimize path lengths. As an old overclocker, I don't believe that this compact soldering is only due to motherboard footprint. It would allow them greatly push the RAM chips to their limits.
  - bonsaibilly 4y ago
    > While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint. Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first place. There’s no such thing as a pluggable LPDDR5 stick; the design decisions around low voltages & high signaling rates make it physically impractical to survive the longer traces and discontinuities involved in the signal traversing a connector.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Maursault 4y ago

> After 2021's mind-blowing release of Apple M1 Silicon [sic], we're left a little bit underwhelmed with this year's nominal performance bump in the M2 Pro and M2 Macs chipsets. From time immemorial, Apple's new releases have only ever had incremental performance gains from the previous release of whatever model. It has always been this way, and it is true of the M1 and of the M2. What is mind-blowing about M1 is its efficiency, and that Apple switched platforms seamlessly while still incrementally increasing CPU performance. I don't understand why anyone expects things to change and to see a massive increase in performance at every model refresh when that has never ever happened. Yet at every new Apple release, there's always this disappointment from pundits and people who should know better that the new machine isn't exponentially more performant than the last model. What is causing this?!

ajconway 4y ago
But M1 did provide fundamental increase in performance. It had only 4 performance cores, yet it could build my code 1.5 times faster than the mightiest i9 of the time.
- merb 4y ago
  tbf the mightiest i9 mobile chip at the time was pretty bad, thermal wise and throttled extremly fast, besides that it was basically offered for ultrabooks... I mean the m1 did draw only half or even less power than the mightiest i9 mobile chip at the time (and still does lol)
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  The M1 is fast for a few reasons: * It uses a fabrication process that noone has gotten their hands on yet. These have always been massive jumps, and giving access to that node to AMD and Intel gets them to similar performance (actually, they already are at similar performance with the same gen). * You're buying an un-upgradeable SoC. Soldered on everything means fast interconnect, while others have to play ball with standards that allow me to change components whenever I want. * It's a pretty damn good CPU. So, out of these three, Apple is responsible for 1/3. Dump an i9 on a SoC with a 3nm process and it'll eat the M1 alive. There's no "fundamental" increase.

conorh 4y ago

I'm going through the Apple self repair process currently and it has been excellent. I spilled coffee that managed to get inside my Mac Studio (via the front ports) and it stopped powering up. I downloaded the self repair manual and followed the instructions to disassemble it; found coffee on the power supply which may have caused the problem. I ordered a replacement power supply from the very well organized self repair order site. I was also happy to see that they promote recycling by giving you a good amount of money back if you send the old parts in. I'll find out on Monday if my theory about the power supply is correct :) I don't know how much of this is due to the new regulations, but it has been a very smooth process.

cyberlurker 4y ago
This is incredible and the first time I have ever heard of money for returning old, damaged parts.
- commoner 4y ago
  In the automotive industry, replacement auto parts are often sold with a deposit called a core charge that is refunded when the old part is returned to the seller. https://www.bar.ca.gov/arsc/newsletters/newsletter/fall-2021/core-charges-explained https://www.bar.ca.gov/arsc/newsletters/newsletter/fall-2021...
- tencentshill 4y ago
  It’s quite common for cell phone repair shops to send the damaged screens back for a buyback. They can reuse a lot of good OEM components on a display assembly.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wackget 4y ago
Usually with liquid damage it's possible to clean and dry the component thoroughly using isopropyl alcohol and it can work again. Did you give that a try?

popol12 4y ago

I like that the guy talking about the macbook has a framework laptop on his desk

anonymouse008 4y ago

> We spend a lot of time criticizing Apple for their anti-consumer practices like monopolizing its repair ecosystem with parts pairing, engaging in psychological obsolescence, and lying to congress—among many examples of poor corporate behavior—but here’s one thing they’re finally doing that shows a lot of promise— the Self Service Repair program. Whoever was on this team at inception and whoever is still running it today - you are an ember of what made Apple, Apple. Thank you sincerely. Truly, you all should be expert witnesses to the antitrust cases to show what exactly it takes to do what everyone is expecting to ‘happen overnight’ done excellently.

adolph 4y ago

Did Apple just Sherlock iFixit?

olliej 4y ago

“Psychological obsolescence” is a new one. Now it’s wrong for Apple to even release new products??

traviswt 4y ago
How dare they make a product I want to buy!

brundolf 4y ago

I appreciate the work that ifixit does, but they often have this tone that's just dripping with cynicism/snark, and for me it's really off-putting We get it, you don't like companies that don't make the most repairable products. It gets a little tiring