I’ve cracked exactly one laptop screen in my life. It was in 2020, when I broke the IPS screen on my Lenovo laptop, and boy do I remember the repair bill. It looks like Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro could be just as painful to repair, especially if you need to get past that gorgeous new OLED display.
iFixit has just published its teardown of Apple’s new 14-inch touchscreen MacBook Pro. Among the many things it covers (including how the glowing Apple logo on the back works), the MacBook’s repairability score is one, and it’s not looking good (via iFixit).
How repairable is Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro?
Apple’s MacBook Pro PROLED has earned a repairability score of 5 out of 10 from iFixit. Two interesting things stand out about this score. First, it’s one point higher than 2025’s M5 MacBook Pro.
However, it would be a 4 under the company’s 2027 marking scheme, and that one point would go away because of the soldered memory and storage. The teardown also notes that the HDMI port and SD card reader, and replacing both, could be a headache.
It’s not like you can’t replace anything inside the MacBook Pro’s chassis. The fans and USB-C ports are replaceable, which is a good thing, but the technician would have to pull the whole logic board apart.
On the brighter side, Apple seems to have eased up on its usual parts-pairing restrictions. When iFixit dropped in a logic board from another PROLED MacBook Pro, Apple’s Repair Assistant recognized the display, battery, and Touch ID. The touchscreen even worked with no additional calibration.
How does the glowing Apple logo work?
The old one used the panel’s backlight to glow. However, the glowing logo on the latest touchscreen MacBook Pro uses a strip of four LEDs. Their light bounces off a reflective layer, passes through a diffuser, and lights up the Apple logo as a whole.
The logo has a mirror-like coating, much like a two-way mirror. It’s shiny when the LEDs are off and see-through when they’re on. However, reaching the glowing logo, in iFixit’s own words, is an “insane repair path.”
As for why the laptop weighs less, that’s partly because Apple has trimmed aluminum from the base and lid. The moral of this story, at least for me, is to be extra careful with the new MacBook Pro PROLED models.
Not only is repairing the display a challenging process, but the replacement parts will almost certainly be extravagantly expensive, too.
