It might be impossible to recover data from a 2018 MacBook if the logic board fails



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Repairing Apple devices can be frustrating even if you have an Apple Store nearby. The company is doing everything in its power to make elegant and powerful equipment, but it pays little or no attention to repairability. For example, if you need to replace this faulty butterfly keyboard, Apple needs to exchange the entire upper case. The butterfly mechanism has been improved in the latest MacBook Pro, but Apple seems to have taken a big step back when it comes to recovering data from a broken MacBook. According to a new report, there is no way to recover data from a 2018 MacBook Pro if the logic board dies.

The riddle of data recovery is a direct result of Apple's pursuit of a thinner laptop. Starting in 2016, Apple has made the storage module a fully integrated component – a SSD soldered to the board. If you want a larger system drive or if something breaks, you have to replace the entire logic board (the PC people would call that a motherboard).

It seemed like a faulty logic board would take all your data to this big recycling bin in the sky, but the 2016 and 2017 MacBooks have a backup solution. There is a data recovery port on the card that Apple technicians can use to copy the data from the built-in storage to a new MacBook using the migration wizard. Apple has made a special interface box specifically for this process.

According to the complete disbadembly of the iFixit MacBook Pro 2018, this port is missing on the new model. Thus, a faulty logic board means that your data is lost even if there is nothing wrong with the SSD. Your only hope is that the machine will work well enough to boot into target disk mode, which allows access via the migration wizard on another laptop

The now missing recovery port via iFixit.

Internal service documents obtained by MacRumors technicians to emphasize to customers the importance of data backup in Time Machine. This seems like a good advice considering the alternative.

It's unclear why Apple would delete the data recovery port of the latest MacBook, but that might have something to do with the addition of the custom T2 chip. This silicon bit debuted in the iMac Pro, providing hardware data encryption, storage controller and other key features of the system. This apparently prevents just the migration of data from one SSD to another. Apple suggests customers contact data recovery companies like DriveSavers and Knoll in case irreplaceable data is stuck on a broken MacBook, but it's unclear how they could help when Apple itself can not.

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