MacBook Pro 13" Touch Bar 2018 Teardown
ifixit.com
ifixit.com
In the first week of ownership, I ran into the issue that the LTE is flaky coming up from hibernate. Trying to debug that issue (spoiler: there is no fix) really made me appreciate how Apple is operating on a different level from other PC manufacturers. The fact is that Lenovo doesn't have the expertise to make an LTE card or write drivers for it, and neither does the company that makes the card for Lenovo (Fibocom). Fibocom takes an Intel reference design, buys Intel chips, throws the other components on the card, glues some Intel code together and ships it. Lenovo buys it and puts it in the machine, but doesn't really know how it works. When it doesn't work, it's not Intel's problem (they just make reference designs and sell the chips), it's not Fibocom's problem, and even though Lenovo takes responsibility, it's out of its depth in fixing the problem.
Compare Apple. They don't just take an SSD and slap it in a machine. They make their own SSD controller and combine it onto a chip with other functionality. Non-upgradable? Yes. But at least they understand how their own machine works.
I am a horrible user. I severely mistreat my equipment. My laptop rides in a backpack full of tools, crimpers, patch cables, sand. It goes on my back when I climb towers, work on buildings, and work in the office. It gets left in my black SUV in the Florida sun where it gets to 130+ deg f.
I've opened and closed the screen at least 4000 times since I bought it 3 years ago. It's been dropped several times. Sat on. Stepped on. Kicked. Liquids spilled on, both opened and closed. I've left it on and put it in my backpack more times than I can imagine(I disable stand-by on close) to later find it had shut itself down due to overheat. But it survives.
My cat sits on my lap, half over the keyboard, so it gets full of cat hair routinely.
I bought accidental damage protection because I was sure I would destroy it before it reached the end of it's useful life.
Nothing has broken and I've never had to even call Dell. The finish is getting worn on the keyboard because I use it easily 12 hours a day. The chassis has nicks and scrapes all over it. I just opened it for the first time since buying it to install a 1TB SSD. I took the keyboard apart at the same time and de-furred it.
And it has LTE. I've yet to see a Macbook even give you the option for LTE.
My girlfriend's MBA is sitting in the closet going on a year now with a cracked screen that nobody knows how it happened. Just opened it one day and it was cracked.
Everything may be pretty and work great inside a walled garden, but I prefer choices and options -- the ability to get exactly what I want.
They do expect you to stay within the Apple ecosystem, and it works surprisingly well if you can live with it. It severely limits choice - and won't work for everyone.
Which is the same as an embedded modem. I know the US a third-world country when it comes to mobile networks, but why Apple assumes this is the case in other countries -- I don't get it.
Saying there are no driver issues cannot be true, just by googling for cases under support.apple.com
Bought a pixelbook instead and haven't looked back. It has an extra port (can charge and still have a free port). The keys actually travel. It has a decent touchscreen and (to my surprise) a better touchpad than my macbook pro had. General build quality is probably better too. Despite the extra features, the pixelbook is slightly cheaper.
Android apps work great. There's crouton for a full-blown linux dev environment (Crostini generally works well for me, but VPN isn't working yet). If rumors are true, windows support is coming too.
That may be true for the HDD, but Apple uses tons of third-party components elsewhere. Large parts of their OpenGL drivers, for example, are written by the manufacturers themselves, which is part of the reason why Apple has by far the worst OpenGL support in the industry, and why Metal on desktop is inferior to Direct3D and Vulkan.
> Apple was careful to mention its latest third-gen keyboard in its press release. The added quietness seems a bit underwhelming to our ears, and we suspect there's something more going on... As you may have heard, there's a brand new silicone barrier under here. Apple says this new addition is purely for soundproofing, but it bears a suspicious resemblance to their 2016 ingress-proofing patent—one that might help prevent the keyboard failures we keep hearing about. This bears further analysis. We'll have a deeper dive on the keyboard situation later in the week. Stay tuned!
Relevant image:
https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/Xi2aYwBSYTs2fZT1.h...
My future buying decisions will depend a lot on my confidence level in the keyboard.
(Of course, with $100bn+ in cash, they probably should do this, but I can see why they wouldn't.)
I don't think people really care about apologies. They just want a working laptop.
2- Apple's marketing strategy has always been to declare themselves geniuses that make magical product. Explaining that they are just like any other company and also completely screw up goes against that.
If a fix happens to do both then you're stuck in murky grey territory.
I guess that contributes to it being the fastest ever hard disk in a laptop: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/13/2018-macbook-pro-fastes...
"To be fair, Apple’s relatively new APFS file system is designed to speed up file copies using a technology Apple calls Instant Cloning. But a win is a win."
These numbers are similar to the iMac Pro, which uses a similar setup (T2, multiple flash chips).
I don’t think the benchmark was dumb enough to just be ‘cp fileOne fileTwo’, they would have taken the APFS instant copy into account.
Which are 4x faster than USB-C.
https://thunderbolttechnology.net/blog/difference-between-us...
See this one from the Surface Book 2 which is from 2017:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12167/the-microsoft-surface-b...
2800MB/s sequential read and honestly once I went with PCIE SSD's I can't go back to regular SSD's only for secondary storage. Sad they soldered it on though. Good luck fixing that laptop when that drive fails...
Most of the performance gains, relative to other current PCIe SSDs, are likely due to the APFS file system stack, tuned with their specific hardware.
As they say, a performance win is a win, but the hyper-focus on Apple hardware (and consequent lack of understanding of the software stack) is misleading.
> Looks like one of the Thunderbolt ports on the right-hand side, probably the one closest to the headphone jack, is connected to the T2 by way of a USB switch. This is probably the port that is used to perform a DFU restore of the iBridge, like on the iMac Pro ( https://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/2.7/#/apdebea5be51) It’s possible that data recovery could also be performed via that Thunderbolt port given the right tools.
The T2 ARM coprocessor secure enclave with encryption keys is connected to an external PCIe bus that is also connected to the main x86 CPU? Is there a risk of DMA attacks like PCILeech? What policy restricts devices that can pair with the T2?
None?
When I went to the Genius Bar because my laptop had WiFi issues, they didn't boot from the internal hard drive, they booted from an external unit that seemed to do way more than just function as a USB-external-HD.
If they mean "self-service" recovery, then I don't know that a soldered hard drive is any different from a removable one. It either works or it doesn't, if it does you can recover from a recovery partition... if it doesn't then you can't recover no matter what.
They appear to have removed that port for this revision.
I'm pretty sure it can, just that the methods are (currently) beyond the reach of DIYers.
Besides, there's probably easier ways... like tapping into the decrypted data. Like any classic DRM scheme, if you have the key and the algorithm, you can get the content. That does not make it easy, but it can certainly be done with enough effort.
That would be very huge news worth many millions of dollars as it's the critical piece of iOS device security.
Once, with one brand, in 2010. And it took 9 months.
And, if you work with confidential information, just about any issue would make these machines disposable (even within warranty) if your organization is unable to remove the drive containing said confidential information before sending the unit in for repair.
You can read more about it here: https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/24/apple-special-cdm-tool-macboo...
Apologies for ranting here; I just hope I can save another person from this BS if they attempt to rely on this port. Through the entire process no Apple rep would confirm the existence of the tool so they made it seem like I was forced to use them for the warranty repair with total data loss.
If I may ask, samcat116, what's the normal procedure for handling warranty repairs at a certified repair center like the one you work at? Is it just labor cost, with parts billed to Apple? And does that include the copying of the data off the SSDs? I'm imagining for warranty repairs the easiest way to handle them is to just swap the logic boards out like Apple does and not bother doing actual diagnosing at the board level like https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup since the customer isn't paying for parts?
Does that mean there's an NFC antenna somewhere on the laptop?