davidw

Here’s another perspective on the “Pro” label. One might say, “who cares about ease of repairs if you’ve got a paid service plan like AppleCare…however they do it, it’ll get taken care of”. In the PC world, the business line of Dell’s laptops (“Latitude” labeled) are designed to be *very* repairable, especially compared to their lowest end products. How does this help the “pro” user? Pro’s who use their laptop every working second of the day really *hate* to part with it for long, especially if it is still mostly functional. It means that when someone has a broken keyboard, we can arrange for a company rep to visit on-site (This is included in the sub $200 service plan) and they’ll sit at our conference table and replace the keyboard in under an hour (their toolset consisting primarily of a few phillips head screwdrivers). Compare that to taking their MBP to the Apple Store and being told they’ll have it back in 2 days (or so).

Yes, this is extremely fragile. A couple of the pins on the logic board broke off. They are very tiny pins that are secured to the board surface with solder. I was very careful with it too, but they broke nevertheless. There is no repairing that when it happens. Thus, I have no IR sensor (which I never used) and no front LED (minor loss - not worth the cost of a new logic board). Works fine otherwise.