Teardown of 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro shows revamped designed with soldered SSD

What you need to know

  • iFixit did its teardown of the new 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro.
  • It revealed that the SSD is now soldered down but it has a bigger battery.
  • The bigger battery will help power the new Touch Bar, Touch ID and T2 chip.

With a new Apple product upon us, iFixit conducted its trusty teardown to see exactly what's new with the 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro and found that a lot has changed.

On the exterior not much has changed, but inside, Apple moved around some things and tweaked others to make room for the new Touch Bar, Touch ID fingerprint scanner and T2 chip. The main tweak to this was a slightly bigger battery, which is now a 58.2Wh battery over the previous 54.5Wh battery.

This ensures the base MacBook Pro still delivers the same 10-hour battery Apple promises.

On the not-so-good changes, this time around the modular SSD was removed for one that is soldered down. This is offshoot with the Thunderbolt board becoming modular and replaceable.

The other main improvement was made to the butterfly keyboard. It comes with the third generation keyboard complete with new materials such as the membrane to ensure it doesn't wear down. Either way, the keyboard is included in Apple's Keyboard Service Program, so you can rest assure if it does break down, it won't come out of your pocket.

Overall, the 2019 13-inch MacBook Pro earned a repairability score of 2 out of 10.

Danny Zepeda