iFixit

Unfortunately, the Retina display is not nearly as impressive when it's been beaten and broken, but it is still impressively thin.

The glued layers are about 1.5 mm thick, and that includes the metal mounting plates.

We need to clarify this before continuing with the teardown; Apple did not design and build a 1.5 mm thin LCD panel. They did, however, do something exceptional with the design of this display: rather than sandwich an LCD panel between a back case and a front glass, they used the aluminum case itself as the frame for the LCD panel and used the LCD as the front glass.

• TL;DR: The entire display assembly is an LCD panel.

At last! With the LCD removed, we can remove the antenna and FaceTime cables from the display assembly.

The camera cable is routed along the outside edge of the display assembly, making replacement very difficult and costly. Thankfully the cameras fail very infrequently, if at all.

If the FaceTime camera were placed at the bottom of the display, it would likely be much easier to replace, but we wonder what kind of awkward side effects that would cause.

• Disclaimer: iFixit does not believe that the FaceTime camera should be placed at the bottom of the display assembly. That is a silly idea.

iSight, uSight, we all sigh at lame jokes. Anyway, iSight is a thing of the past. This MacBook Pro has a FaceTime camera, allowing you to video chat with your grandmother in full HD.

The camera board comes out easily enough, considering the work it took to get there.

The camera interfaces with the rest of the computer via the Vimicro VC0358 USB camera interface IC.

Underneath the top layer of the LCD, we find a series of films and sheets that manipulate light before sending it to the user's eye.

Warning, the explanation we're about to give is painfully abridged. If you want an easy-to-understand take on how LCDs work, check out "Bill The Engineer Guy's" teardown of an LCD monitor.

Diffuser and prism films evenly spread the light to create an even backlight for the display panel. A stationary polarizing sheet then works in conjunction with the liquid crystals to block or allow light for each pixel, all 5+ million of them.

The light guide plate is held down by a small strip of mild adhesive—nothing like we saw before.

Erring on the side of caution, we proceded very slowly with our modified iSesamo opening tool and removed the plate.

Backlight bounces through the plate due to total internal reflection until it hits one of those tiny dots, which sends the light up and out of the front of the plate.

By the way, the third picture is an image of the grid found in the clear plastic plate being removed in the second picture. We had to coerce it a bit in Photoshop in order to make it show its grid.

The plain-looking sheet of white paper serves as a uniform white background for the LCD's backlight.

What else would you use to light an LED-backlit display? LEDs, of course!

A strip of 48 LEDs at the bottom of the display assembly provides all the light your Retina display needs.

There's no real reason to pull the foam off the inside of the back case, but this is a teardown, so we're doing it.

• We suspect that the foam is there to provide a flat, even surface for the LCD glass to brace against. But there is one thing that we do know about it: it is super sticky.

The bottom edge of the case has two features that we found pretty neat: a laser engraved data matrix code and a nifty arrangement of round indentations.

Upon further inspection and with the help of some keen-eyed readers, it appears that those dots form the pattern of a glider from Conway's Game of Life, the universal symbol for hackers.

• That sixth dot to the right, though? Apparently, if you were to place that dot while playing, it would place the entire game in a state of death. Is Apple trying to send us a message?

And there you have it, the Retina display from the new MacBook Pro.

Normally we would provide you with a repairability score at this point, but since this display is part of another device, that's not really appropriate.

What we can tell you is that if anything in the display assembly breaks, you'll need to replace the whole thing. It will be more expensive than just replacing the LCD inside a regular MacBook Pro, but it will also make the choice (of whether to replace just LCD or entire display assembly) very easy.