Hope You Like Touch Bars: A MacBook Pro Teardown Story
Teardowns

Hope You Like Touch Bars: A MacBook Pro Teardown Story

Apple has issued a refresh for its base model 13” MacBook Pro—but this time, function keys on the Pro are gone for good. Let’s see if that makes a difference in the two-Thunderbolt-port 2019 MacBook Pro 13” teardown.

To be honest, we didn’t know quite what to expect—but it wasn’t this. For the most part, the inside looks a lot like the older, function-key model, and not the typical Touch Bar type—but they definitely didn’t just squish a Touch Bar in there. The refresh also brought a soldered SSD (bad), modular ports (good), a shrunken speaker and heat sink (eh?), and a T2 chip (wildcard). Perhaps the initial Function Key vs. Touch Bar design was an A/B test; if so, it seems Apple has now settled on the one MacBook to rule them all.

But what about that (possibly obsolescent) butterfly keyboard, you ask? It’s the same slightly-updated 3rd-generation keyboard that came equipped with the May MacBook Pro refresh. The jury’s still out on whether it’ll fix those pesky typing issues, but it seems Apple already threw in the towel—perhaps biding their time until a radical (scissor?) redesign—as these new MacBooks are already included in Apple’s Keyboard Service Program.