iFixit’s MacBook Pro teardown gives the 14-inch MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display a repairability score of 5 out of 10, one point above last year’s M5 MacBook Pro. You can swap the logic board without breaking Touch ID this time, but you still have to pull that board out to replace a fan or a USB-C port.
iFixit published its full teardown on November 10 and weighed the major parts against the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6. The touchscreen model weighs 1.38 kg (three pounds), which is 170 grams less than that model. iFixit put each part on a scale to find where Apple cut the weight.
Touch ID Survives a Logic Board Swap
iFixit swapped logic boards between two of these laptops, and Repair Assistant recognized the battery, display and Touch ID sensor on the first boot. A couple of key presses and a reboot later, True Tone, full brightness control and the touchscreen all worked. The touchscreen needed no separate calibration.
Repair Assistant could not finish calibrating Touch ID on last year’s M5 MacBook Pro. This time iFixit enrolled a fingerprint with the donor board installed, put the original board back, and enrolled again without trouble.
A display repair still means replacing the whole lid, which comes off as one assembly. iFixit says the new lid is as easy to replace as last year’s, and Apple has not put parts for the laptop on its Self Service Repair store yet. iFixit expects the lid to cost more than the non-touch model’s.
The Lid Gains LEDs and Loses Weight
Older MacBooks lit the glowing Apple logo with light from the LCD backlight, but the PROLED XDR display makes its own light pixel by pixel. Behind the panel, iFixit found a strip of four LEDs along one edge, a reflective layer and a diffuser that turn those four points into one evenly glowing logo. The logo has a mirror-like coating that looks shiny when the LEDs are off.
Reaching that strip is a bad repair path, and iFixit’s advice if the logo ever goes dark is to live with a plain Apple. If you would rather not see it lit at all, you can turn the glowing logo off.
The panel did not survive the attempt. iFixit warmed the lid from the back and worked a thin pick into a corner, and the glass delaminated and cracked the OLED and capacitive layers underneath. iFixit says removing the panel intact seems possible in theory, but it could not manage it.
Under the microscope, the blue subpixels are much larger than the red and green ones. Blue OLED materials wear out faster, so a bigger blue patch lets each bit of material work less for the same light. The panel also stacks two light-emitting layers, which is what makes it a tandem OLED display.
Apple’s newly designed hinge turned out to be nearly indistinguishable from the three-screw hinge on the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6. A tap on the lid of the touchscreen model produces a bit less wobble, which iFixit puts down to minor spring tuning. It also found nothing shared with the iPhone Duo hinge, as had been rumored.
The display assembly weighs 384 grams, down from 485 grams on the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6, even with touch and the LED strip. The lower chassis dropped from 456 grams to 364 grams, and the bottom cover accounts for 44 of those 92 grams.
The 72.6 Wh battery weighs 276 grams, only 2 grams less than the battery in the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6. The speakers got heavier at 39 grams for the pair against 29, and the trackpad lost 8 grams because it is smaller.
What the MacBook Pro Teardown Leaves Unfixed
The two fans and the USB-C ports still sit under the logic board. The USB-C ports are modular and sit on their own small boards, so you can replace only the port that wore out. The port has to tilt to clear the case, though, and the logic board sits exactly where that corner needs to go.
A bad fan sends you on the same trip under the board, and the second screw for the headphone jack hides there too. MagSafe comes out after two screws and a bracket, but the HDMI port and the SDXC card reader are soldered to the board. The storage is soldered to the logic board as well, and the memory is unified.
Getting the logic board back in is the hard part, and Apple recommends taping back every cable so none gets caught when you reinstall it. The battery still comes out with pull tabs, and iFixit had trouble getting all of them out in one piece even though they were brand new.
iFixit scores the MacBook Neo one point higher, partly because you can replace its keyboard on its own. The keyboard in the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is built into the aluminum top case, and reaching it costs you a battery. Starting in 2027, iFixit’s laptop scorecard will deduct more for soldered memory, and under that rubric this MacBook Pro would score 4 out of 10.
