Teardown of Apple's 11.6-Inch MacBook Air Underway
iFixit has
wasted no time in getting its hands on a new 11.6-inch MacBook Air and beginning to disassemble it to see what's inside. While the
leaked prototype image offered an idea of what the innards would look like, iFixit will almost certainly find some additional tidbits of information.
Some notes of interest:
- The case is screwed shut with 5-point Security Torx screws, suggesting that Apple does not want consumers disassembling the machine.
- The battery consists of six separate cells offering a total of 35 watt-hours of power.
- The machine's 64 GB of flash storage is composed of four 16 GB Toshiba chips together with a controller chip on a custom removable board. The SSD weighs in at 10 grams, down from 45 grams for the hard drive used in the previous generation. The new drive is also less than half the thickness of the platter-based hard drive.
- The new MacBook Air uses the same Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip as in the current MacBook Pro.
- RAM is soldered onto the logic board and thus not user-upgradeable.
- iFixit gives the new MacBook Air a repairability score of 4 out of 10, with the low score due to the difficulty of opening the machine and the proprietary nature of the components inside.
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