Apple MacBook Air Teardown: iFixit Goes Where Apple Prefers You Dont

by Michelle Maisto

Apple introduced new 11- and 13-inch MacBook Air notebooks Oct. 20. They offer a choice of 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 64GB or 128GB of flash storage and 2GB or 4GB or DDR3 SDRAM. Go for 4GB, advises iFixit, as the notebooks cant be upgraded.

A major difference in the new MacBook Air is that Apple replaced the hard drive with a solid-state drive comprised of six chips-four 16GB flash chips from Toshiba, a Toshiba SSD controller and a Micron DDR DRAM cache chip.

The inside of the MacBook Air is dominated by the battery, which comprises six individual lithium-polymer cells. The 11-inch Air is said to offer five hours of battery life, while the 13-inch model gets seven. Both feature 30 days of standby time.

The 11.6-inch display on the smaller MacBook Air features a resolution of 1,366 by 768 pixels. iFixit found that Apple also substantially enhanced the rigidity of the display assembly.

According to iFixit, the WiFi/Bluetooth chip in the new MacBook Air is the same as the use used in its line of MacBook Pro notebooks, pictured here.

Apples tidy little package all undone is pictured here. In conclusion, iFixit reported, We wish Apple would stop intentionally preventing users from upgrading and repairing their devices.