Apple gets a lot of grief about its products being difficult to repair, but the company is showing a few signs of addressing the issue. The latest involves the MacBook Pro with Pro and Max chips. Apple now has available individual speaker parts for these laptops, which means that if the speakers break, they can be replaced without having to replace other components.
Macrumors reports that a memo distributed to Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers this week says Apple is offering standalone speaker repair parts for the first time in nearly a decade. This should make repairs easier to do, cutting down on service time and costs. In MacBook Pro models before Apple silicon, the whole top case of the MacBook Pro had to be replaced if a speaker needed repair. That meant that a customer had to pay for replacing parts that didn’t need to be replaced, which made the repair expensive.
It’s not clear why Apple is only beginning to offer the new parts now since it doesn’t just apply to M4 MacBooks. Nor do we know if the new speaker assembly will come to the MacBook Air with its own M4 upgrade next year.
The speaker repair manual is available online, so third-party repair shops can do the fix, along with the Apple Store. However, the speaker repair is far from simple, so if you need to do this, you might be better off having a service technician do it.
Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro (M4)
Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro (M4 Pro)
Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro (M4 Max)
Apple 16-inch MacBook Pro (M4 Pro)
Apple 16-inch MacBook Pro (M4 Max)
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor, Macworld
Roman is a Macworld Senior Editor with over 30 years of experience covering the tech industry, focusing on the Mac and other products in the Apple ecosystem. He is also the host of the Macworld Podcast. His career started at MacUser, where he received Apple certification as a repair technician (when Apple did that kind of thing). He's also worked for MacAddict, MacLife, and TechTV.