You can’t replace the HD because it’s soldered to the MB. There’s no longer an optical drive. Replacing the batteries and fans are both extensive repairs.
“Community” is key here. It’s not official.
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You can’t even get a replacement. The flash chips are integrated into the logic board (the yellow squares in the picture below). The T2 chip (orange) contains the controller.
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For sure. Lots of reasons upgradability or reparability can be reduced, the glued assemblies allow for a thin light strength with less seams, but is a major pain to work on. replacing the glued in keyboards takes a proper heat station and glue reflow station.
I’m all for upgradability and many of these decisions make it difficult for me to recommend apple hardware to many people.
many of apples “official fixes” are outright unit replacements sans customer data. that isn’t really a fix. while i love having super light powerful devices, i’m a strong guy and would gladly trade some weight for more battery, extra ports, etc.
i’m just here to correct the inaccuracies in the the “tech reporting” of the article, if it can be called that. 
the shop here replaces many of these keyboards, i’ve had a keyboard replaced in a 2017, just the keyboard, when it failed due to being used in an extreme environment live coding a patch into a running system. lots of component level repair done every day on these macs here at least. the new machines suck to work on for sure and none of this repair is official supported.
this. it is all one part now fully integrated. they could add a NVMe slot for a second drive though, NVMe SSD take hardly any room. same with the RAM. they can have their super way faster because it is directly integrated version and expansion slots, but that isn’t the current priority in their engineering tradeoffs alas. sighs. i’m still waiting for touch screen with a pen digitizer. lol.
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In case you haven’t noticed yet from all the descriptions above, these are unrepairable appliances that need to be replaced every three years, whether or not they need to be replaced. And I’m not being sarcastic. There isn’t room in the Apple business model for DIYers.
It’s not like they need the money, though.
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Didn’t we go through this with radios and television sets? Sure, in the 1940s into the 1960s television sets came with schematics and easy to remove vacuum tubes for simple user repairs. By the late 1970s, television sets were transistors on printed circuit boards that had to be replaced as modules. By the 1980s they were almost impossible to repair oneself, and almost no one ever bothered. On the plus side, integrated circuits just didn’t burn out the way vacuum tubes did.
Cars did this too. They needed constant repairs, so they were relatively easy to repair. Then they got complicated. Then they got reliable. Automobile service and repairs used to be big chunk of dealer business. Now it’s vanishing. Even body work is modular, and parts vanish in maybe five years after the model date. Sure, I’d like a hot ROM that ups my mileage and to hell with emissions control, but big auto isn’t going to go for that. It’s all a plot, like suppressing that engine that ran on water.
Now it’s computers, and there are security issues too. If you want a relatively secure computer, you need to make it nearly impossible to repair without some verification system that makes a compromised system impossible to use. Apple tries to produce a relatively secure product, and that sucks for the do-it-yourself types. The problem is, that if it is easy to do it yourself, someone else can do it to you.
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If you’re in a certain profession, the choice is: Mac or Wintel, not Mac vs. Chrome.
(And often, it’s both. I mean, not at our shop, but we’re hardly a universally applicable case.)
Yep. It’s not like these devices are tools and we have problems that need solving or anything.
People who have no idea what my deadlines are or mean, who try to tell me that what I’m doing is wrong politically never seem to have a good enough solution waiting to drop in as a replacement.
And I should know, because I tried replacing Apple myself in the late 1990s/early 2000s with a different platform.
Political arguments against Apple as a company ultimately matter little when it comes down to fulfilling specific demands. “But,” goes the argument, “you can just use ChromeOS/Ubuntu!” hints at why it is often a waste time trying to explain why.
I get that calling users iDiots may make some folk feel special. But those who make careful choices when it comes to our tools tend to not consult people like that for a reason.
See:
Do you know what Thunderbolt is?
And this is why I do my own research and still walk out of an Apple store.
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Nope. That is the experience of CUPS on Linux in a nutshell. I just email any documents to myself at work and do it there. Thus reducing my ink bill to zero AND sticking it to The Man.
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Again with this fascist crap. Crapple.
Why does Apple hate their customers so much?
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Definitely! At least they don’t force updates without consent. There’s always a workaround.
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So would I. But I don’t imagine that I’m typical. Even so, the last time I was 20 years old and didn’t mind lugging around a heavy-assed laptop was many decades ago at this point, and I’d rather not return to that.
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If you knew that you were going to lose data, would you consent?
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Debugging ordinary computer programs can be fun and rewarding. Debugging printer problems, on the other hand…
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That’s why I don’t consent to the update until I check around to see what other users have experienced.
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I’ll try to explain it again. The security enclave means that there are components that can only be replaced by Apple. My point was that there are already such components that, Apple won’t do the repair for you, either, once you’re out of warranty. After 1 or 3 years, your expensive computer could become worthless because of a single broken part. Sure, you could get insurance. Apple loves this solution, because they still make just as much money, selling new gear more frequently than they otherwise would.
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I haven’t used a printer in years, but trackpads are another pain in the ass. The generic ones are rarely accurate. Again, all this can be gotten around, but that’s why I recommend most people who want a Linux machine get one with it pre-installed.
The other hurdle though is that they’re going to have to get use to the Terminal. If they’re adverse to the Command Line in Windows/DOS, that might frustrate them more than Windows’ shenanigans.
I’m a fan of Linux, especially the Ubuntu and Red Hat distros, but I’m also cautious in how zealously I recommend them to users raised on GUI.
Supposedly you can get extras from China on the gray market, but I’ve never tried. I suck at soldering and soldering something that small, originally soldered by a robot, would be a nightmare. Some people are artists with an iron. I am not.
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When I finally phoned Apple support, they told me my 2011 Mac Book Pro was “vintage”…
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Someone with a hot air rework station could certainly replace the chips with little effort. They are just BGA packages, not magic. Louis Rossman demonstrates this all the time on his YouTube channel.
The problem is the T2 secure enclave (which also houses the disk controller) and the crux of the article is that simply replacing hardware isn’t enough without Apple’s special process for “blessing” the repair.
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So, um… It looks like this is all academic anyway.
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That’s good, but I wouldn’t call it academic.
As they put it, any “secret repair kill switch hasn’t been activated – yet.”
That said, the bigger problem is that any manufacturer can install a chip to brick your devices on a whim or that of any who can hack them. That should be illegal.
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