Cracking Open the Apple MacBook Air

Bag it

The Apple Store handed us our MacBook Air in plastic bag with strings attached that could be used like a backpack. How quaint.

Back of the box

The back of the box confirmed the specifications of our Air. As specs go, this MacBook will never be considered a high performance notebook.

Merchandising

The front of the box lets you know that you have purchased something cool -- just forget the specs on the back.

Hey, it's thin

When you open the box, you get your first indication of how thin the MacBook Air really is. The tray with the actual notebook is removed and most of the depth of the box is power cord and documentation packet.

Wait -- don't open

Read the license agreement before opening? Yeah, like that is going to happen.

Apple logo

The lid of the MacBook Air sports the famous Apple logo, which lights up when the notebook is on.

No latch

As is the current fashion the lid is not fastened to the bottom -- just left the lid and starting working.

Cables and documentation

The MacBook Air comes with a DVD containing the Mac OS, but the notebook is drive-less. Apple also included two dongles for connecting the mini-DVI out to an external monitor using either VGA or standard DVI.

It works

For the sake of full disclosure -- our Apple MacBook Air is in working condition before we crack it open.

Plug trickery

As a Windows guy, I don't get much opportunity to see the odd things Apple does with cables very often. The power cord for the Air can be extended by removing the two-pronged plug.

Plug trickery

Plug trickery

Plug trickery

With the extension, we now have a power cord with a three-prong plug.

How thin is it?

To get an idea how thin the Apple MacBook Air really is, we placed it next to a pad of notebook paper, a Visual Studio magazine, and a copy of the book Hacking Windows Exposed.

On edge

The MacBook Air is certainly stylish and the thin form factor means it is very light at about three pounds. However, it doesn't feel flimsy. But what is inside?

Plan of attack

To get inside the MacBook Air we have to remove 10 screws, which will allow us to remove the back plate. This proved to be much easier than the various iPods we have cracked open.

Power magnet

One interesting feature of the Apple MacBook Air is the magnetic power connector. I have never had anyone ever trip over my notebook power cord, but apparently it happens to people who have Apple computers all the time so they needed a special connector.

Hidden ports

The MacBook Air has only a few interface ports and what ports there are, are located under this flip-open door.

Three ports is plenty

The three ports are a mini-DVI out, a USB 2.0 connection, and an audio headphone jack. The microphone and camera are located on the lid above the LCD display.

Back is off

After removing the 10 screws the back plate comes to reveal the inside of the MacBook Air.

Battery

The most obvious thing to remove next is the battery. Unlike many of the Apple products we have cracked open in the past, the Air has a battery configuration that could actually be replaced if necessary.

Closer looks

Panning around the insides we can see the main circuit board where we will surely find the RAM, CPU, graphics chip, and alike.

Closer looks

On the other side we have the housing for the hard drive.

Closer looks

Over here is the chipset for the WiFi in our MacBook Air. That is a Broadcom chip there.

Battery removed

The battery is thin and is really a very large version of the batteries we see in iPods.

Another battery view

Clean lines

The Apple MacBook Air is laid out nice and clean. I commend Apple and the engineers and designers who worked on this product.

Ribbons everywhere

The connecting apparatus of choice is the ribbon cable. They are all over the place inside the MacBook Air. Of course, that fits with the thin profile of the notebook.

LEDs

A ribbon even connects to the LEDs on the front of the Air.

Hard drive

Remove a few screws and the hard drive housing comes right out.

Hard drive

The hard drive is wrapped in rubber and foam to reduce shock to the drive.

Hard drive

Because of space restrictions, the hard drive size is limited to 80GB. The the RPMs are limited to 4200. Not exactly cutting edge storage technology.

Heat sink

Where there is a heat sink there is usually something hot underneath.

Paste it

After removing a few screws and prying of thermal paste we reveal the Intel Core2 Duo CPU and the Intel graphics/North Bridge chips.

RAM

There are two sets of eight chips making up the 2GB of RAM.

RAM

Micron supplied the RAM for our MacBook Air.

RAM

Besides the other eight RAM chips you can also see the chips that make up the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) system.

LCD

The LCD screen lies underneath the remaining infrastructure. In the upper left is the Broadcom WiFi chip set. One of the screws just refused to come out, but there is not much to see under there.

On the right is the sound board. That board was cooperative.

Sound

Not much too the sound board. You can see the round speaker. However, this small setup produces quite a bit of sound.

More sound

Common to many notebook's these days, the sound is produced by a Realtek ALC885 audio codec chip, located on the flip side of the board.

Cracked open

The Apple MacBook Air is a relatively simple notebook computer. Without an optical drive, Apple was able to get the basic parts of a notebook in a very thin space.

I am happy to report that our MacBook Air went back together without any trouble and is working just fine.