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The Touch Bar MacBook Pro’s SSD is permanently stuck in place, teardown shows

Published Nov 15th, 2016 3:26PM EST
MacBook Pro Specs

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The first MacBook Pros with Touch Bars are arriving in the wild, and as you’d expect, people have already started tearing open their multi-thousand-dollar laptops for our entertainment.

We’ve already seen teardowns of the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pros, but one forum user has already torn the bottom off his 15-inch Pro. What he found inside will shock you, if you don’t wear an anti-static wristband.

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We’re used to Apple machines being nigh on impossible to upgrade after the fact. The older MacBook Pros let you upgrade the SSD, provided that you go out and purchase a proprietary drive from a third-party company for a crazy amount of money. (And, even then, the drive wasn’t as fast as the one that came with the computer.)

With the new Touch Bar Pros, Apple’s cut off even that tiny upgrade option. Although you can still take the back plate off with a tiny screwdriver, the SSD is permanently soldered to the logic board, and not upgradable in the slightest.

Forum users also noticed one other oddity: the batteries in the 15-inch Pro are weirdly small, leaving a bunch of room between them and other components. That’s different to every other Apple product we’ve seen torn down, which show battery crammed into every spare inch to maximise longevity. It’s unclear exactly why the 15-incher has the gaps — it could be something to do with the maximum battery size you can take on an airplane, or a little battery was shaved off at the last minute to meet a weight goal.

Chris Mills
Chris Mills News Editor

Chris Mills has been a news editor and writer for over 15 years, starting at Future Publishing, Gawker Media, and then BGR. He studied at McGill University in Quebec, Canada.