Houston, we have lift-off! This teardown has achieved first stage separation.

On initial inspection, the 15" MBP looks ... like a scaled up version of the 13" model. We do notice a difference in the battery layout, but overall it's like looking at twins.

Look who we ran into again! The connector to nowhere.

Scuttlebutt in the comments on our last teardown is that Apple may have included this to access the soldered-in SSD for data recovery.

We'd still rather see a removable/upgradeable SSD, particularly in a machine targeted at pros—but this way if your logic board bites the dust, there might at least be a chance of recovering your data with Apple's help. Keep making those backups though.