“After years of neglect, Apple has finally updated the widely-beloved MacBook Air,” iFixit reports. “Does this new lightweight have what it takes to keep up with ultraportables of 2018? Or is it just full of hot air? Let’s open it up and find out.”
“The Air bears a remarkable resemblance to the Touch Bar-less 13″ MacBook Pro—apart from thickness and Touch ID, they are nigh indistinguishable,” iFixit reports. “And despite the “Air” nomenclature, this makes the 12″ MacBook look like a lightweight by comparison.”
“Just six Torx screws and a few cable connectors stand between us and logic board removal — not bad!” iFixit reports. “Continuing the repair-friendly (or at least friendlier) trend, we find stretchy adhesive pull tabs under these elongated speakers! We don’t love adhesive — reusable screws are nearly always better — but hey, pulling out this iPhone-esque stretch-release stuff is loads better than gooey solvents and blind prying. Plus, the mere presence of stretch-release adhesive generally means that someone at least thought about possible repair and disassembly situations.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Getting better!
SEE ALSO:
Apple makes MacBook Air with Retina display battery replacements easier, less wasteful – November 7, 2018
“neither storage nor RAM is upgradable”. Overall IFixit score is 3 out of 10. UNSAT.
Precisely. Apple can, and should, do better.
Apple underestimates the number of people who are turned off by this bad design. Smart people refuse to pay a premium to get unrepairable hardware.
Funny how MDN tries so hard to find the best spin.
Over at AppleInsider, the headline is:
“Teardown of Apple’s 2018 MacBook Air shows decreased repairability versus previous model”
Summary line:
“A teardown of the redesigned MacBook Air shows that Apple has turned to glue for the speakers and batteries, versus the previous revision which used tiny screws to hold the components in place.”
http://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/08/teardown-of-apples-2018-macbook-air-shows-decreased-repairability-versus-previous-model
Negatives:
– adhesives instead of fasteners
– Apple T2 chip forces a run through Apple diagnostics even for replacing commodity components like battery or speakers
– a pentalobe driver is required to open the case
– RAM is soldered to logic board
– SSD is soldered to logic board
– small battery is underwhelming
– Y-series processor is slower than U-series used by competitors
– poor cooling design
I really need a new MacBook Pro. But I am so not into spending over $4k with Apple’s rip-off RAM and HD prices to get the machine I want when the machine it would be replacing was only $2,700. If I could upgrade RAM or HD I’d buy a base model MacBook Pro and buy third party RAM and SSD.