The new, 37 percent friendlier-to-squirrels and tree-frogs MacBook Pro box. Yay for pallet density! Oh, and it's heavier than it looks.

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Old on the left, new on the right.

The keyboard is now more similar to the old MacBook than the previous MacBook Pro. While the unibody case is very cool, this is going to make keyboard repair difficult.

New, rounded bottom. And a much darker plastic wireless window.

In the box:

The holes in the speaker grill are significantly smaller, making the upper case surface feel smoother.

Ports, left to right:

MagSafe Power Port

Gigabit Ethernet Port

Firewire 800 Port (FW 400 with optional cable)

USB Port X2

Mini DisplayPort

Audio Line-in , Audio Line-out

ExpressCard/34 Slot

Removing the battery cover.

Aww, look at the cute little Apple logo.

Remove one Phillips screw to release the hard drive bracket. The screw is held captive to the bracket.

Remove the four T6 screws securing the hard drive.

Replacing the hard drive is significantly easier on this machine than the previous MacBook Pro.

This machine uses the same, industry standard SATA notebook drives as previous MacBook Pro and MacBook models.

Shameless plug: Of course, you can upgrade the hard drive in any Apple laptop. We have free guides for every model that makes hard drive replacement easy.

Kudos to Apple for making this easy. Keeping repair costs down is probably the most environmentally friendly thing Apple has done with this machine.

The first step to opening this machine is removing the bottom plate.

Remove the following 8 screws:

Let's see what's creating all that torsional rigidity that Jony Ive keeps talking about.

We're inside!

Disassembling this laptop is reminiscent of the old PowerBook G4 Titanium models, and very similar to the MacBook Air.

You remove the bottom plate, and everything is screwed into the upper case. The case is now Apple's custom-machined unibody enclosure.

The interior is cleaner and flows together better than the previous Pro.

Cable routing from various parts of the case to the logic board is simpler in this than the new MacBook because Apple had more room to play with.

Removing the two 1 GB DIMMs. These chips are a new RAM type for Apple, 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM.

Apple claims this machine maxes out at 4GB RAM, but the Montevina chipset appears to support up to 8GB.

Shameless plug: You can upgrade your existing MacBook or MacBook Pro to 4 GB. We'll also be offering the RAM for the new Unibody machines in the near future.

We're going to remove the optical drive next.

Disconnect these two connectors.

To free the Superdrive, remove the following 3 screws

Liberating the optical drive from the confines of this beautiful machine.

The optical drive is SATA for the first time. Panasonic model #UJ878A.

The superdrive in the last model was ATA, model #UJ857.

You can see the different connectors in the middle picture. The new, SATA connector is on top.

The rightmost photo is a shot of the new drive label.

Pry the two fan connectors up off their sockets on the logic board.

Remove the following 6 screws:

Three 3.1 mm Philips screws.

Three 3.7 mm Philips screws.

Removing the two cooling fans.

There are a number of ribbon cables to disconnect from the logic board.

Remove the following 11 screws:

While our circles make it look like there are a lot of screws, this machine appears to have fewer screws than the previous MacBook Pro. These screws all attach directly to the solid-piece upper case, which should simplify maintenance a bit.

Removing the logic board.

The top of the logic board, with the heatsink still attached.

Logic board top with heatsink removed.

The large chip on top is the Intel 2.4 GHz Montevina processor. It has 3M L2 cache and a 1066 MHz bus. Markings: 5827B493 SLB4N AV80577P8600

The other two large chips are Nvidia graphics chips.

We'll post part numbers as we identify them.

Logic board bottom.

Here are the two Nvidia chips! They occupy a significant amount of the logic board. There's no way both of these puppies could fit in a MacBook Air.

The first chip is marked 37N3C2 0836B2 PB6623.S03 MCP79MXT-B2. This is the GeForce 9400M, also serving as a northbridge.

The second chip is marked U807B034 0827C1 NH7962.01W G96-632-C1. This is the GeForce 9600M GT, which has 32 processor cores and is capable of 120 Gigaflops.

Continuing the disassembly, we're going to remove the display assembly.

Remove six 6 mm T-6 Torx screws near the hinge.

Removing the lower display bezel.

Removing the Airport card.

Disconnect the antenna connector and the data cable.

Remove the two screws.

The Bluetooth cable disappears into the display, and our sources tell us that it's sandwiched between the glass and the metal case. This means that if your Bluetooth goes out, you may have to replace the entire display!

Airport card (the pink is a thermal pad).

The "unibody" upper case assembly.

This case assembly includes the keyboard, glass trackpad, and ribbon cables.

While the manufacturing of the case is sexy, our sources say that Apple is treating this as a single replaceable part. This means that if you break a key on the keyboard, you'll have to replace the entire upper case. That could get very expensive.

In an attempt to save a lot of people a lot of money, we're going to try removing the keyboard from the upper case.

The keyboard is secured by lots of tiny black Phillips #000 screws. We're removing ALL of them.

OK, we got them all out. There are 56 screws on the keyboard, plus two on the power button.

This is looking promising!

We got it off! Phew. It took about 15 minutes to remove all the screws.

It looks like users may be able to repair their own keyboards after all! Great news for the heavy-handed and spill-prone.

Wow! What an incredible machine. We are very impressed by the ease with which the new MacBook Pro came apart. This machine should be a joy to work on.

Bottom left: hard drive and battery.

Top: Display

Center: Logic board, fans, and speakers

Bottom-center: subwoofer, optical drive, RAM, and heatsinks.

Right: Custom-machined unibody upper case and keyboard.

Here's a high resolution image.

Looking for more pictures? We've also disassembled the new MacBook.