Thanks for the look inside one of these industrial-size high bay lights!

It would be fun to make it go again … the driver looks like a relatively simple device, and a bit of probing with an oscilloscope, and a lot of thinking and schematic sketching, might reveal which component died. :)

In practise, the efficiency of an LDO regulator is dependent on how much voltage it is dropping. While operating, an LDO is effectively a resistor that varies in real-time to ensure its output voltage stays stable despite changes in load current.

Power = I (current) x V (voltage)

Since an LDO is a resistive element, yes, it burns off energy as heat in this process. So an LDO dropping 18V to 5V could be very inefficient, more so when driving a higher current load as shown by the formula above. However, if an LDO is used to generate a 3.3V rail from a 5V rail, it is dropping just 1.7V, resulting in less power dissipation for the same load current.

You’re right, using an LDO for a large voltage drop is not good electrical design. But LDOs have excellent noise rejection performance, meaning they can take a noisy rail from a switching buck/boost converter with lots of transient or high-draw components on it, and create a much cleaner rail for lower-current, more sensitive devices. This is what I expect Apple’s doing.

Great teardown and history lesson! I didn’t know what ADC was—a proprietary Apple interpretation of DVI. Apple hasn’t changed a bit, for better or worse. The world is a better place for it though :)

Neat look inside the most unique key fob in recent memory. Thanks for posting!

The only thing that's missing is a rundown of the ICs on the board. If you don't mind, can you add a close-up of each side of the board and write out the numbers inscribed on each package? Armed with that info, we can see what parts and vendors Tesla used in the key fob, and this is one of the things I find most interesting.

I’m still confused about how the display data cables interact with the hinge. In the 2016 MBP teardown, I thought iFixit said they get rolled up or something. While the pictures in this teardown helped shed some light on this mechanism, I’d really like to see some detailed shots of how exactly that all works. Maybe in classic iFixit style where the position of just a few things within the frame changes seemingly magically between two pics. Thoughts/comments?

Come on, it's got to be better than 3! This is a marked improvement over the last several editions of iMac, and that deserves some praise and positive reinforcement.

Did iFixit suddenly get a legal team? :D

I would have liked to have seen if the camera indicator LED is powered from the same source as the camera itself. This is an important security feature in other MacBooks, and only iFixit can keep Apple accountable as we move forward. Still got that display lying around?

Really awesome guide. I appreciate the time you took to take those shots and put it together; it really cuts down on the time (and guesswork) it takes for me to repair something. One thing -- those are Torx T5 screws, not T4. The T4 bit I was using almost stripped the head of one of the tighter screws as I was trying to remove it.

It's pretty amazing how simple the inside of a phone looks these days.