2011 MacBook Pro Teardown Complete; Thunderbolt Light Peak Port Inspected Too

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As expected, the 2011 MacBook Pro laptops have been made public yesterday, and we already have a teardown guide for you from the folks over at iFixit. Just like with its predecessors, we now have an idea on what Apple has hidden inside the new 15-inch MacBook Pro laptop.

Besides the faster Sandy Bridge processor or the new AMD graphics card we’re more interested in that Light Peak technology that was finally made public by Apple after years of development. Dubbed the Thunderbolt, which is quite an interesting name considering the yet-to-be-released Android device, the Light Peak port is already a very interesting addition to the MacBook Pro line, although we still need peripherals to test it out later down the road.

The Thunderbolt I/O port combines a PCI Express and DisplayPort and each of them get a 10Gbps data channel. In other words you’ll be able to stream HD video to an external display straight from an external hard drive, both connected via Thunderbolt at the same time and both operating at top speeds. Initially you’ll be able to connect up to six Thunderbolt devices at once although we’re still waiting to see them in stores first.

Besides the Thunderbolt port the iFixit crew looked at other details of the new 15-inch MacBook Pro laptop and here’s what they found:

• The battery of the machine is still not user-replaceable. Battery life has decreased from 8-9 hours to 7 hours, although the battery is the same. What Apple modified are the real time usage conditions that take into account Wi-Fi usage and screen brightness. The battery will probably offer 8-9 hours whenever not stressing the device too much. Although iFixit hasn’t been able to determine any changes yet.
• RAM: PC3-10600 RAM – the same as the one used in the 21.5- and 27-inch iMacs
• The wireless card has now four antennas instead of three. Broadcom BCM4331 “wireless solution” offers three receiving streams in both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands
• Various temperature sensors: near the trackpad, in the battery, on the logic board and two fans to deal with the heat
• “Holy thermal paste! Time will tell if the gobs of thermal paste applied to the CPU and GPU will cause overheating issues down the road.”
• AMD Radeon HD 6490M GPU. ATI brand nowhere in sight on the graphics card.
• Quality control issues: “stripped screw near the subwoofer enclosure and an unlocked ZIF socket for the IR sensor”

In other words the new, 2011, MacBook Pro laptops should be better machines than their predecessors considering what’s inside not to mention recent benchmarks. But the real question is whether regular users should upgrade to the next-gen MacBook or wait another year? Would you go for a new MacBook Pro?