As Apple's laptops have become thinner and lighter, they've also become more tightly integrated. The tradeoffs here are the same as they've ever been: lighter laptops that take up less space are obviously desirable, and manufacturing practices like bonding glass directly with LCD panels improve display quality beyond what would normally be possible. The downside is that you can do increasingly little to repair or upgrade these laptops yourself, and iFixit's teardown of the 2015 MacBook shows that it's even harder to work on than recent MacBook Airs and Pros.

The fun begins when you remove the pentalobe screws on the bottom of the laptop and attempt to remove the lower case—while this lower case is just a standalone piece of aluminum in the Air and the Pro, in the MacBook it actually houses some components that are connected to the rest of the laptop via cables. Be careful of these cables while removing the bottom case.

The MacBook Air's battery isn't meant to be user-replaceable, but in practice it's relatively trivial to pop open the bottom of the computer and swap it out yourself if you have the right tools. In the Retina MacBook, it's much more difficult, both because the logic board has to be removed before you can disconnect the battery cable and because the battery itself is firmly glued into the case. As usual, fusing the LCD to the glass earns more scorn from iFixit, since breaking the glass or the LCD panel itself requires the replacement of the entire display assembly.

Putting aside the repairability issues, Apple is pulling some interesting tricks to make the MacBook fit into its case. The logic board looks a whole lot more like something you'd see in an iPad than a MacBook—since it doesn't need a fan or large heatsink, Apple can get away with a small, densely populated board. On the top is the Core M package itself, which contains dies for both the CPU/GPU and the chipset. The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips are on this side as well, along with one of the SSD's two flash chips and some smallish RAM chips. AnandTech's resident SSD expert Kristian Vatto believes one of the chips to be a combination of controller and cache memory for the SSD, and we think the other could possibly be cache for the power-saving Panel Self-Refresh feature.

On the bottom of the board is the main 8GB bank of system RAM, the other half of the SSD's flash memory, and a couple of miscellaneous controllers and sensors. The green bit is the voltage regulator on the underside of the CPU package—to save this piece from taking up extra space, Intel moved it to the underside of the CPU package in Broadwell. This allows OEMs like Apple to make a small cutout in the system board for the voltage regulator to sit in, as it has done here. Finally, Apple has routed the wireless antennas into the speaker assembly. iFixit speculates that the speakers themselves could be serving as a "compound antenna," improving wireless reception without requiring a bunch of extra space for larger antennas.

iFixit gives the MacBook a repairability score of one out of ten, the same score it gives the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro (the MacBook Air manages to claw its way to a four out of ten, due mostly to the lack of glue and easily replaceable battery). From a repairability and upgradability standpoint, there are no upsides to the MacBook: you'll be reliant on Apple or Apple-certified technicians for repairs, and you'll need to perform all the upgrades you want when you order the system. This is nothing we didn't already know, but it's too bad that MacBooks are now regularly less repairable than something as small and intricate as an iPhone (7 out of 10). For more details and pictures, as usual, the full teardown is worth reading in its entirety.