New MacBook Pro Speakers Are Most Affordable to Repair Since 2015

Can't wait to order 11 of them and build a Dolby atmos setup in my living room !

Wow. I had no idea this was a limitation in prior models. It seems like every few weeks I find out some new way the 2016 models were absolute trash.

The 2016 models are not trash except for the butterfly keyboards, which Apple routinely replaced. My 2016 MBP ultimately RAMmed-out due to the 16 GB maximum available at the time, so I bought an M2 MBP with maximum M2 RAM. But the 2016 MBP still drives any single app fine and still gets used every day, just no longer aggressively multitasking.

As far as reliability goes, the 2016 and 2017 pros specifically have been some of the most unreliable machines Apple has put out pretty much since the 2011 model pros/imac/that one mini with the nonstop AMD HD6xxx GPU issues. They were basically a walking hardware liability back in the day, and they still are as of right now, on top of them becoming fairly end of life at this point since Monterey is being sunset before end of this year and Ventura being sunset next autumn.

2016/2017 was plagued with so many repair issues and needed so many different repair programs, to the point where there were even 4 concurrent quality repair programs running at the same time for some models, such as:

* 13 inch 2016 display flex issue (only covered 13 inch 2016 model and only for certain backlight issues up to 5yrs from purchase date, which was extended from 4yrs. The display flex fault also affected all the 15 inch 2016 and all the 2017 model pros and also had more symptoms beyond just backlight but Apple never bother to acknowledge it or do anything about it, and the people that were covered by this program got another 2016/2017 display which means it's just gonna fail again since there were no changes made to the part)
* butterfly keyboard, which is a repeat failure problem that Apple no longer covers and it's just doomed to fail again since the 2016 part just gets replaced with the 2017 part which fails just as much. only covered you up to 4 years from purchase
* 13 inch 2016 non-touchbar battery swelling program, covered only up to 5 years from purchase
* 2016/2017 Pros with battery failure that causes them to not charge past 1% (added prevention fix in BigSur but this was a thing for some time)
* SSD failures due to faulty firmware on 2017 13 inch non-touchbar for 128/256gb models. Covered ssd swap up to 3 years

Basically the problems with these machines has gotten so bad to the point where the 2015 model MacBook Pros became so extremely desirable as a suitable replacement, not only because they still had the ports at the time that people wanted to use, but because they had none of the horrendous reliability issues 2016/2017 had, a minimal difference in performance overall with the exception of graphics applications on the 15 inch model specifically though even then the 2015 model was not super far behind, slightly better thermals thanks to the slightly thicker heatsinks, plus the ssd was still fairly easy to upgrade and both generations of these machines only maxed out at 16 gigs anyways so they were closely matched

If yours is still working perfectly fine to this day then great, you definitely need to consider yourself lucky because this was not the experience a lot of other people had with this generation machine. Butterfly keyboard and display are by far some of the most common repairs that we did on these machines back in the day, not counting physical damage or liquid damage

Damn, I replaced my own speaker on my 2020 MacBook Pro on my own without replacing the top case. Easy.

Update: According to a reliable source, Apple is giving technicians access to individual speaker parts for ALL 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with Apple silicon, going back to models with M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. It remains to be seen if those parts for older models will be added to the self-service repair store too.

I’m not sure why this is a thing. How often do people blow out speakers on a laptop? I rarely turn my Air over 50% volume and its speakers are weak compared to the Pro.