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

https://www.ifixit.com/News/71442/tearing-down-the-14-macbook-pro-with-apples-help

by transpute • 3 years ago

168 168 3 years 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.

AshamedCaptain2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

bayindirh6• 3 years 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.

titzer• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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 ...

brookst3• 3 years ago

Do motives matter? I’m hard pressed to think of a company doing the right thing for noble reasons rather than profit motive.

throwanem2• 3 years ago

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

FearlessNebula• 3 years ago

Which company and which critical material?

throwanem2• 3 years 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

bitwize• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

bayindirh6• 3 years 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.

masklinn3• 3 years 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.

captn3m0• 3 years ago

SSD speeds have gone down in the past with a huge perf hit: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/27/23184515/apple-macbook-pr...

And because this is soldered down, you can’t fix this like how it would be doable on other laptops.

goosedragons2• 3 years ago

The SSDs aren't any faster than consumer NVME M.2 drives. Apple does get to save some pennies because the the SSD controller is in the SoC instead of being on the board with the NAND chips. They've also neutered performance on the M2 base models by only including 1 NAND chip on the board instead of 2 so you no longer get the benefits of striping and faster speeds. To top it off they then charge you $200 to bump a base model 256GB to 512GB which is absolutely ridiculous when you can get a very good 1TB M.2 NVME SSD at retail for less.

While their absolutely is benefits to how they handle their RAM the upgrade prices are nuts. $200 extra for 8GB more, 64GB requires a CPU upgrade and costs $400 extra over 32GB. I've heard the CAMM modules Dell developed and seem poised to replace SO-DIMMs in laptops will allow for faster speeds and replaceable LPDDR too with less Z height and eaiser board design so hopefully we will see an uptick in PC laptops with replaceable memory again.

inamberclad• 3 years ago

I still wouldn't be impossible for them to throw a DIMM socket in there. Even if the expanded memory is at a higher latency, there would still be many perfectly good applications for it.

zakki• 3 years ago

I think it is be possible to add a slot for RAM and SSD expansion slots inside the body. Let just say the current embedded RAM is an L3 Cache.

*I’m no expert just a wild guess

Wowfunhappy• 3 years ago

Perhaps, but it's being done for a real reason (beyond Apple's bottom line)--without sockets, Apple is able to achieve drastically higher memory bandwidth/latency at low power consumption, and the architecture is built around this.

Terretta• 3 years ago

Stats from the e-commerce vendor in Germany show that Apple's laptops have a fraction of the "in warranty" repair rate, roughly 1 in 200, with many laptops at 1 in 20 or worse.

It's pretty clear that Apple's decisions about manufacturing approaches are not to make iFixit's job harder or easier, but to avoid needing iFixit at all for most users.

ChuckNorris892• 3 years ago

Because a lot of Apple users go directly to Apple for warranty claims/repairs, not back to the retailer. That's apples to oranges comparison.

threeseed7• 3 years ago

Storage isn't as much of an issue with Thunderbolt 4.

The connector exceeds what even the fastest NVME SSD can deliver and the form factor of enclosures are small enough that you can simply carry it everywhere.

jltsiren• 3 years ago

Thunderbolt 4 is a fast port but a slow bus. It's effectively 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0. High-end consumer SSDs typically expect PCIe 4.0 x4, or twice as much bandwidth. Thunderbolt 5 is supposed to provide that once it's finally released, but by then PCIe 5.0 SSDs will also be out, doubling the bandwidth requirements again.

sixothree• 3 years ago

I noticed from the article the amounts of storage included with these are so paltry that the chips are becoming harder to source. Yikes.

Maursault32• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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)

ohgodplsno2• 3 years 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.

Maursault32• 3 years ago

But M1 did provide fundamental increase in performance.

No it didn't. Look at the Mac mini benchmarks.[0] It is a smooth curve of increasing performance from the oldest models up to the M1. Performance is increasing faster, as should be expected, but the increases in performance from model to model are incremental, always resulting in "experts" being surprised and disappointed. M1 Mac mini is not ten or five times faster than the 2018 Mac mini, and not even twice as fast. It is 26% faster in multicore performance and 36% faster in single core performance. These are increments, not massive leaps in performance.

[0] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/mac-mini-late-2020

bangonkeyboard• 3 years ago

From time immemorial...only ever had...always been this way...don't understand why anyone expects...that has never ever happened...should know better...

iPad 2 a year after iPad 1 had 2x faster CPU, 9x faster GPU, 2x RAM, weighed 15% less, was up to 33% thinner in every dimension, and had longer battery life.

Maursault32• 3 years ago

iPad is not a Mac, and you're massively exaggerating. The iPad had a single core CPU, iPad 2 a dual core. Mystery solved there. The GPU was not 9 times faster![1] DDR2 RAM, released 8 years before the iPad 2, is twice as fast as DDR. You should be complaining about the iPad not having DDR2 rather than being amazed at the performance leap between subsequent generations, which, btw, was indeed incremental.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/SGX535-vs-SGX543MP2_2376_2572....

dbspin• 3 years ago

This is inaccurate, the performance gains over intel 9 Macbook Pro on the higher end Mac Pro's (Max and Ultra) are not incremental. Depending on the task it can be twice as fast (e.g.: real time video editing of heigh bit depth, high resolution video). But a general boost in overall performance is visible in even synthetic benchmarks - e.g.: from 1250 to 1745 in Geekbench. A 43% increase. Moreover a perceived boost to performance was notable to even the most casual users in boot time, general OS responsiveness and file copying between the intel and M1 generations. I agree that it's not reasonable to expect this to continue as M1 develops.

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

Maursault32• 3 years ago

This is inaccurate, the performance gains over intel 9 Macbook Pro on the higher end Mac Pro's (Max and Ultra) are not incremental.

You are comparing apples and oranges. Within specific model releases, MacBook Pro vs next MacBook Pro, Mac Pro vs. next Mac Pro, and every single other Apple model release compared to it's previous and subsequent releases, the performance gains have always been incremental. I don't understand how anyone could expect it to be otherwise.

scyzoryk_xyz• 3 years ago

You’re looking in the wrong place. Time immemorial this is has been how tech journalism and marketing works.

In other words, drumming up excitement/disappointment is a feature, not a bug.

(Otherwise factually I agree with everything you said)

Maursault32• 3 years ago

Apple picks and chooses what it wants to showcase, but their marketing is reasonably honest in the details. The problem comes from misinterpretation of what they are showcasing, "30 times faster performance in some Photoshop filter," doesn't say anything about whether the machine is faster overall at everything than some bizarre whitebox someone built that is missing expensive Mac features. But, in general, at release, more often than not Macs have been the fastest performing machine at that moment, though within a few months they're no longer faster than such and such PC, and Macs have a long wait between in-model releases. There were 4 years between the 2014 Mac mini and 2018 model, and 6 years between the 2013 Mac Pro and the 2019 Mac Pro. That's a lot of time for the competition.

jcadam• 3 years ago

So, no reason not to pickup a refurb/clearance M1 MBP and save some money :)

Maursault32• 3 years ago

That's why there's a market for old Macs. I acquired two quad-core 2012 Mac minis in 2021, which is quite the upgrade from my 2010 MacBook Pro. But the low-end Apple Silicon minis are so cheap I don't know how I can avoid owning one within the next year.

crazygringo• 3 years ago

What is causing this?!

Pundits criticize, that's what they do. It's impossible for anything to ever be "perfect". If a product is simple then it can be criticized for not having enough features, if it's full of features it can be criticized for not being simple enough. And when everything's pretty much fine, the standard criticism is "the new version hasn't changed/improved enough". (While when lots of things change/improve, it becomes "but is it too different/incompatible for people used to the old version?!")

The job of a pundit isn't to try to provide any kind of objective or even consistent truth. It's just to provide talking points than turn into headlines that drive clicks.

The pundits, as people, absolutely know better. But that's not their job as a paid pundit. Their job is to drive clicks and comments and engagement.

brookst3• 3 years ago

Yes, and most pundits can’t think about target markets. How often have you read a review of a luxury car / computer / resort from someone who works hard to make $50k/year, and their complaint is that the product is too expensive?

We all have different financial situations. Tell me what’s good and bad about a product and let me decide if it’s “worth it” for the price point.

smoldesu5• 3 years ago

I don't understand why we should be impressed when GPU, single-core and multi-core power consumption has gone up. Apple cut off Intel and AMD so they could stop bumping the wattage for marginal performance increases. Ironically, now Apple is the one stranded on a unique manufacturing process, and AMD/Intel are the ones reducing their wattage.

It's not disappointing, but it's hardly impressive. Once again; this is the world's largest company, and we're freaking out over TDP trades for performance. It reminds me of the people in the 90s who would shill Disney's theme park tech; maybe it's cool on a technical level, but these people have billions of dollars. What's impressive is running Linux on unsupported hardware or single-handedly getting a copy of the no-fly list. I can't be bothered to give a fuck about Apple spending 18 months to make a 40% faster GPU that consumes 20% more power.

Maursault32• 3 years ago

Ironically, now Apple is the one stranded on a unique manufacturing process, and AMD/Intel are the ones reducing their wattage.

That's not irony. Irony is that, right now, no other hw manufacturer can compete with Apple. I don't think Intel or AMD will ever be able to compete again until they abandon x86/amd64 and release their own ARM chip. Apple will not sweat before that happens.

threeseed7• 3 years ago

The strategy is to follow iPhones/iPads and have both M1 and M2 options.

So there is no point releasing a major update and making the M1 look obsolete. They just need a solid update.

jayd16• 3 years ago

What a silly hill to die on. Some releases are certainly more exciting perf wise than others. Usually excitement is tied to some technology upgrade like SSD or new ram or some such thing. This is a boring upgrade.

Maursault32• 3 years ago

I didn't die on this hill, I pioneered it and conquered it. I'm developing it. See the difference? What is silly is expecting an exponential increase in performance from one generation model to the next. That never happens, not at Apple, not anywhere.

duxup• 3 years ago

I have an allergic reaction to what I think of as constant editorializing on everything these days. Feels like everything has to have a label as underwhelming or amazing. There was an iFixit video a bit ago where they made a weird comment "oh no where is the heat spreader!?!?" like it was missing or amazing ... they were holding it.

Not that those comments can't be on point, but it feels like everything now has something like that.

And yeah efficiency is the impressive part of those chips.

xctr94• 3 years ago

Thanks for saying this. It’s a bit toxic if reviewers are constantly demanding immense change, immense improvements. Small incremental gains are great. We’re mired in spectacular technology. If anything, software practices and efficiency are the parts that most need to catch up.

highwaylights2• 3 years ago

Lack of domain knowledge.

Reviewers online aren’t particularly well informed. They think they are because many of them sort-of-kinda understand the devices they’re talking about at a high level, but they’re not really familiar with how it works and what the constraints are.

M2 has very predictable performance, on a line with all other CPU gains in recent years.

M1 had a lot of low hanging fruit to reach for that standardised architectures aren’t able to mimic for fear of breaking things (co-located memory, purpose-built buses, function-specific co-processing). And then they got on a node no-one else could get on due to their backlog.

Maursault32• 3 years ago

I'm starting to see it. Just look at this thread and how insistent many comments are.

whoami_nr• 3 years ago

Wouldn't you consider FaceID to be a step jump in tech? I didn't know IR scanning was a feasible consumer tech before that. Even M1 was the same, right?

robin_reala• 3 years ago

FaceID is basically a miniaturised Xbox Kinect (which also does face tracking), and is firmly consumer tech.

tambourine_man• 3 years ago

That quote seems to have been removed from the site. It's not there as of this writing.

s3p• 3 years ago

This is not even remotely true. The increase between performance in A5 vs A6 was greater than 100%. Or the 41% increase in Geekbench multi from the A10 to the A11. Versus the 14% increase in multi-core from last year's iPhone to the current one.

The performance has never increased by the same amount year over year. It improves drastically in some years, and modestly in others. People get disappointed when Apple fails to deliver the performance gains they have in years past.

Edit: Also the [sic] is unnecessary. Just say you don't like the publication if you disagree with their writing that much.

NovaPenguin• 3 years ago

Immediately I think of the jump from iPad to iPad 2. That was a night and day experience because of the memory and processor jump. But that kind of leap was a one time thing that is the exception.

theshrike79• 3 years ago

Reviewers are reviewing devices for the mythical "buys a new device every year" -person who are a clear minority.

Year over year is never a huge bump, not in features or power.

But if you're upgrading a 5 year old device, the bump is unbelievable.

conorh3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

This is incredible and the first time I have ever heard of money for returning old, damaged parts.

commoner• 3 years 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...

tencentshill• 3 years 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.

wackget• 3 years 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?

conorh3• 3 years ago

Yes, thanks (my comment above is the short version). I cleaned where I found coffee with 99% isopropyl alcohol and qtips. No go unfortunately. When it happened I wasn't thinking and left the Studio turned on while I cleaned up everything else, I'd imagine that did not help.

conorh3• 3 years ago

Update: It worked! The power supply arrived (along with the adhesives that they provided for the bottom black ring - I'd forgotten to order those I guess they just include them with all orders?). After a 10 minute replacement the studio is back up and running.

popol12• 3 years ago

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

anonymouse008• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Did Apple just Sherlock iFixit?

olliej• 3 years ago

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

traviswt• 3 years ago

How dare they make a product I want to buy!

brundolf• 3 years 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

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

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