MacBook Air 11-inch Tear Down by iFixit.com

The iFixit folks, who specialize in tearing down perfectly good products for the purpose of showing us how to open them up in order to look inside for repair, upgrade or curiosity, have done so with the new MacBook Air 11-inch model. They offer step-by-step instructions for taking the new MacBook Air apart if you want to do it yourself.

So what did they find?

• It is held together with 5-point security torx screws
• There are six individual lithium-polymer cells that make up the 35 Wh batter”
• The batteries are all held together by a single battery assembly” which is also held in place by the torx screws
• The SSD drive could be easily replaced by a user if they had the right kind of screw driver just remove the bottom, the battery assembly and the SSD storage board is right there behind where the battery sits on the back right side
• The drive is a custom part which will not be replaceable by stock parts

• There’s a Toshiba label on it with a model number of THNSNC064GMDJ
• The whole drive weighs only 10 grams
• It has the same Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth part that is in the MacBook Pros
• The audio part is from Cirrus Audio
• RAM is soldered to the mainboard meaning you cannot change it yourself without replacing the board or doing some serious soldering

iFixit rates the repairability of all the gadgets they get in. This one they give a meager 4 out of 10, which is understandable since there is so much packed into such a small body. So realize that if you are used to fixing your own computers, you better have some skills or plan to send this one off for repair.