Apple is not a company interested in selling products that are easy to repair, and in the pursuit of thinness, repairability has clearly suffered. The MacBook range of laptops is increasingly shipping with soldered down parts, making it all but impossible to fix them without Apple's help when something goes wrong. However, for the 2018 MacBook Pro refresh, it looks as though data recovery may have also been made much harder.

As MacRumors reports, both the 2016 and 2017 models of the MacBook Pro shipped with a data recovery port that could be accessed using a Customer Data Migration Tool by either the Apple Genius Bar or Apple Authorized Service Providers. It meant that, if the logic board failed in a Pro, the port could be used to recover data from the hopefully still functioning SSD.

For the 2018 MacBook Pro range, the data recovery port has been removed and the SSD is soldered in place making it non-removable. Apple has seemingly removed the ability to recover data from these new MacBook Pros when the logic board dies.

Users are always encouraged to backup their data, but it's still nice to have a last chance option to recover any data that didn't get backed up yet. This no longer seems to be the case, and there's no obvious data recovery alternative available. The advice given in the 2018 MacBook Pro Service Readiness Guide is to encourage owners to use Time Machine frequently.

If you own a 2018 MacBook Pro, it seems the responsibility for maintaining access to all your data in any eventuality now starts and stops with you. If your logic board fails, the data on your SSD won't be accessible, so backup regularly to avoid a potentially horrible situation.

With the news last week that Core i9 MacBook Pros have a cooling problem that kills performance, it's extra important to backup your data on a regular basis and ensure your backup medium is highly reliable. Heat is no friend of electronics, after all.

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