13-inch M2 MacBook Pro teardown confirms Apple’s lazy and ‘baffling’ design

If the considerable screening and your personal eyes weren’t more than enough evidence, we now have definitive evidence that the 13-inch MacBook Professional M2 is nothing far more than a recycled M1.

IFixit has executed its customary tear down of the new equipment and confirmed what everybody expected: the new MacBook Professional is merely a 2020 MacBook Pro with a new logic board. The new equipment are so related, in simple fact, Apple is reusing the identical A2338 design amount on both machines. The screws, the removing process, even the placement of the chips and cables are the same, while iFixit notes that “some of the chips and lesser components have adjusted.”

Among the smaller alterations iFixit discovered is the heat sink on the M1 has marginally rounded corners as compared to the squared off corners on the M2. iFixit also confirmed the slower SSD due to the use of a one 256GB chip on the M2 model vs . two 128GB chips. 

Nonetheless, if you’re hoping to get an M2 logic board and merely swap out the M1, you can’t. Significantly like Luke Miani found out, iFixit discovered you cannot merely swap out the logic boards. When they were being equipped to get the laptop computer to boot, critical factors would not get the job done owing to the “baffling” final decision to make the trackpad and keyboard incompatible with the older chip. iFixit notes that the sections are equivalent, so the situation is probably owing to application restrictions.

Therefore, iFixit feels the M2 MacBook Pro is a “missed opportunity” for Apple to introduce its very first upgradable laptop computer in decades and “set the tone for repairability and eco-welcoming design and style,” specifically since Apple is launching a new MacBook Air with an M2 chip this month with a new design and specs.