“This is significant because it gives the backlight cable more room to wrap around the board and not come into contact with the board as the laptop is opened past 90 degrees,” said Taylor Dixon, teardown engineer at iFixit. Since this change appears in both our 15” model and Olivia88’s 13” model, it’s plausible this change is present in multiple, if not all, 2018 MacBook Pros. Since we were just wrapping up writing the repair manual for the 2018 model anyway, we checked inside our 2018 15” MacBook Pro again to measure its cable against its 2016 predecessor-and found the 2018 cable was, in fact, a full 2mm longer. However, when MacRumors user Olivia88 noticed their 2018 13” MacBook Pro seemed to have a longer cable than previous models, we were intrigued. So far, so good-another design defect exacerbated by Apple’s insistence on making products thinner at all costs. Apple has yet to acknowledge the issue or extend their warranty to affected users. Photo credit: iFixit member kaikaiĪnd since the cable is integrated into the screen, it cannot be simply swapped out-the entire screen must be replaced ( a $700 part). After a year or two of opening and closing the laptop, the cable will wear down, causing the display to start failing with a distinctive stage-light effect. In this space-saving design, the thin cable wraps around a small circuit board where it is pulled taut as the laptop opens and closes. You can read more about Flexgate in our rundown here, but in short: Apple, in an effort to make their laptops even thinner and sleeker, is using thin, fragile flex cables to connect the display to the display controller board beneath the touch bar.

Despite Apple’s refusal to acknowledge the issue, though, their latest MacBook Pros have a longer cable that may be attempting to make up for previous shortcomings. The ensuing scandal was, of course, dubbed Flexgate, after the flex display cables causing the problem. In 2018, a number of MacBook Pro users-with models from 2016 onwards-discovered a serious design flaw that causes the screen to fail after repeated opening and closing of the laptop over the course of a few years.

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