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Inside Apple's MacBook Air
Inside Apple's MacBook Air
Date: February 4th, 2008
Topic: Mac
Manufacturer: Apple
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi
Buy the 13.3 MacBook Air 1.6GHz 2GB RAM 120GB
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Our MacBook Air just arrived and before even turning it on we had a few burning questions we had to answer. These questions of course required us to break out the screw driver and open up the poor little thing.

The MacBook Air is surprisingly easy to take apart, you simply have to remove 10 screws from the bottom of the notebook and just pull the base away. There's no prying, no heat gun and no special tools required. This was infinitely easier than taking apart the iPhone.

With the bottom off you'll see this:

The big black thing that takes up the majority of the real estate is the Air's battery, to remove it you simply unscrew it from the chassis:

With the battery out of the way the MacBook Air is much simpler on the inside. The upper left houses the hard drive and next to it is the motherboard. The little thing in the lower right is the wireless adapter.

We wanted to accomplish two things: get a closer look at the hard drive and have a look at the SFF CPU/chipset that we'd been so obsessed with a couple of weeks ago. Getting the battery out wasn't a problem, but replacing the hard drive proved to be a little more challenging.

Removing the Hard Drive   Next Page

 
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12 Comments - Last by pnorman, 239 days ago
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Tear it apart THEN review it by Messudieh, 655 days ago
I love it! I was really impressed at how small the motherboard was in there. In true Anandtech fashion you guys go after what we really care about. Everyone and their brother will have performance reviews of this thing. You guys took yours apart before even turning it on.

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RE: Tear it apart THEN review it by KeypoX, 655 days ago
not to rain on your parade of anandtech butt kissing. But apple also showed the inside of this thing.

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RE: Tear it apart THEN review it by bigboxes, 655 days ago
I love AT, but LOL

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RE: Tear it apart THEN review it by Cygni, 654 days ago
They sure as hell didnt tell you how to disassemble the thing though, now did they?

not to rain on your parade of internet toughguy cynicism, of course.

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Like the Wii... by Dainas, 655 days ago
Hmm, looks like the innards of what should be a shoestring to make, apple certainly turning a tidy profit off of these(at least 100%).

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The right balance of Mac and PC by dcalfine, 654 days ago
Articles like this are why AnandTech is better than, say, Tom's Hardware.
I love raw benchmarking as much as the next guy, but if I see one more BEST GRAPHICS CARDS FOR TEH MONAY I'm going to pop. The fact that AnandTech takes the time to explore all areas of computer hardware puts a grin on my face.

YAY!

Reply
RE: The right balance of Mac and PC by heulenwolf, 654 days ago
I agree that this is a far better start than provided by other review sites. Appleinsider, for example, started with a good idea of asking its readers what they wanted answered (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08...whats_wrong_with_the_macbook_air.html) in their review and then completely ignored any of the feedback in the actual "in-depth review," (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08...air_hdd_model_an_in_depth_review.html). I hope Anand can address some of those unanswered questions in his review.

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Nice by blueeyesm, 654 days ago
Nice tear down!

Hmm,.. no memory upgrade capability...

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RE: Nice by OccamsAftershave, 654 days ago
Note: the review meant to say "...half of the 2GB is on the back...", not 1GB.

Looks like Apple's counting on the same dupes who stood in line for their $600 iPhone, only to see Apple drop its price by 1/3rd in a few weeks.

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Macbook-Air by crystal clear, 653 days ago
Here is repost of my comment on Daily tech (2/3/08)-

RE: The focus is on specific segemnt of the market
By crystal clear on 2/3/08, Rating: 2
By crystal clear on 2/3/2008 7:30:23 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
I did not have the opportunity to open up the Mac air-


But somebody else did just that-read on

See the pictures of each part with comments about it.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook...

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook-Air

Compare this with Anand's version.

Reply
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