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Teardowns |
MacBook Pro Retina 15" Teardown
We're going a bit teardown-crazy over here, but that's expected — everyone's trying to release their products just in time for Christmas. Today we have a tale of two MacBook Pro Retina teardowns, a 13" and a 15" variant.
Up first is the 15" model, which is essentially the 2012 unit with a couple of performance upgrades. We did a "quick-n-dirty" teardown on that machine, since very little changed in 2013. It scored the same terrible 1 out of 10 repairability; believe it or not, the machine became slightly *harder* to fix. Now people can't replace their headphone jack without replacing the logic board. So unless you're keen on soldering, replacing the headphone jack just became a $1,000 fix.
Note that this is now your only 15" option; Apple stopped selling the non-Retina 15" MacBook Pro.
Of more interest is the 13" version, which we're still working on. It has a completely reworked interior from what we saw last year, and we're working hard to note all the changes.
MacBook Pro 15" Retina Display Highlights: The 15" Retina now has a PCIe-based SSD instead of the mSATA drive of yesteryear. The new Samsung-based SSD contains the following ICs:
- Samsung K4P4G324EB-FGC2 512 MB Mobile DRAM
- Samsung S4LNO53X01-8030 SSD Controller
- Samsung K9HFGY8S5C 32 GB NAND Flash Modules (8 chips for 256 GB total)
Some noteworthy revisions come on the logic board, including the all-new Haswell Core i7 processor, Iris Pro Graphics, and Thunderbolt 2 support:
- 2.0 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.2 GHz) with 6 MB shared L3 cache
- Intel Iris Pro Graphics
- Elpida J4208EFBG 512 MB DDR3 SDRAM (16 chips for 8 GB total)
- Platform Controller Hub
- Intel DSL5520 Thunderbolt 2 Controller
- Cirrus 4208-CRZ Audio Codec, similar to Cirrus CS4207