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.
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pnorman - Thursday, March 26, 2009 - link
Has anyone successfully replaced the HDD in the first generation MacBook Air 1.6GHz model with an SSD?If so, could you let us know the manufacturer and model ssd used, please? And where you purchased it?
Thanks very much!
MBAir - Wednesday, February 6, 2008 - link
There are benchmarks on both hard drive version running in OS X and Vista here:http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/MacBook-...">http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/MacBook-...
The point here is that the Macbook Air is faster than ANY competitor out there.
crystal clear - Wednesday, February 6, 2008 - link
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...
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook...">http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook...
Compare this with Anand's version.
blueeyesm - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
Nice tear down!Hmm,.. no memory upgrade capability...
OccamsAftershave - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
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.
dcalfine - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
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!
heulenwolf - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
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/08/02/02/what...">http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08...whats_wr... in their review and then completely ignored any of the feedback in the actual "in-depth review," (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/02/04/macb...">http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08...air_hdd_.... I hope Anand can address some of those unanswered questions in his review.Dainas - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
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%).Messudieh - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
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.KeypoX - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
not to rain on your parade of anandtech butt kissing. But apple also showed the inside of this thing.