The first MacBook with a touchscreen earns a middling repair rating from iFixit: 5 out of 10, up one on the M5 MacBook Pro from last year. The tested machine is the smaller PROLED XDR model, which has a 14-inch screen. In the teardown, the lid and the glowing logo behind it turned out to be the sore spot, because prying the screen apart destroyed the panel.
Start with what improved. After iFixit installed a logic board taken from a second machine, the battery, display and Touch ID sensor were picked up on first boot. After one restart, True Tone, brightness control and touch input all came back, and nobody had to calibrate the touchscreen. Putting the first board back kept fingerprint login working. On last year’s M5 model, calibration of Touch ID stalled after such a swap, so independent shops that borrow boards for diagnosis benefit most.
The logo is the problem. With no backlight in an OLED, Apple lights the emblem with four LEDs in a strip along one edge of the lid. To see them, iFixit heated the display and worked a thin pick under its corner. The glass came away and cracked both the OLED and touch layers. iFixit concludes that a dead logo light is better lived with than repaired.
Elsewhere it is a familiar MacBook Pro. Fans and USB-C ports still sit beneath the logic board, and pulling that board is easy but refitting it is fiddly. The HDMI port and SD card slot are soldered to the board, as are memory and storage. Opening the base takes four screws, and the lid no longer hides a standalone angle sensor.
The weight loss is real. At 1.38 kg the machine is 170 grams under the base M6 14-inch Pro. Per iFixit’s scale, the lower chassis went from 456 to 364 grams and the whole display assembly from 485 to 384 grams, touchscreen and logo lighting included. The 72.6 Wh battery is nearly unchanged at 276 grams, and its adhesive pull tabs were hard to get out in one piece even when new.
The display itself looks different under a microscope. Blue subpixels are much bigger than red or green, which matters because blue OLED material ages fastest and a larger area spreads the load. Two stacked light-emitting layers make it a tandem OLED, so brightness can match a single layer at lower current or climb higher. It refreshes at 120 Hz and tops out at 2,000 nits.
Costs are the open point. Apple has not listed this model’s parts on its Self Service Repair site, and iFixit expects a lid that costs more than the non-touch one.
On the scorecard, the cheaper MacBook Neo keeps a one-point lead because its keyboard can be swapped by itself, where the Pro’s is part of the top case. iFixit adds that from 2027 it will mark down soldered memory harder, which would put this MacBook Pro at 4.
