Apple bolts chastity belt on super svelte MacBook Air Apple doesn't want you mucking about inside its new 11.6-inch MacBook Air. But once you get past its defences, you'll find that its SSD-on-a-card storage system is a snap to remove. Those are two of the conclusions reached by the parts and repair folks — and teardown fanatics — at iFixit, who bagged one of the svelte ultra- …
Quote from iFixit;
"Unfortunately, like all previous MacBook Airs, the RAM is soldered to the logic board and is not upgradable. Apple does offer a 4GB RAM option at the time of purchase, but if you opt for only 2GB and decide you want more RAM later you'll be out of luck."
Wow, isn't Apple kit marvellous!!!
Don't all Mac portable owners have a set of Torx and Philips #00 screwdrivers? I've spend many a happy(?) hour sticking screws to ifixit printouts! Who says that Apple machines are not user serviceable and upgradable! Tosh!
Speaking of Tosh, Toshiba introduced a range of mSATA SDD drives last year. Expect to see upgrade offerings for Mac Airs from Crucial soon.
We do about 4 a day and I'm not sure I agree with your comment. Most laptops are a sinch to get into, repair and upgrade and parts can be had off the shelf right dam to the damn screws. Its surprisingly easy to upgrade laptops now too. Both myself and my engineers can tear a laptop down to motherboard in 5 mins tops.
The machine I'm on now started life as a 512Mb Celeron, 80Gb Sata drive and DVD combo drive. Right now its running a C2D, 4Gb of memory, DVDR-W DL and Win7. Hard to tinker with, nope.
Only Hpaq feel the need for odd screws and even now thats becomming rare. No I would suspect its more to do with Apples throw away vs fix and the protection racket they have running for anyone stupid enough to want to be an Apple service centre.
The only laptops to drive fear into are hearts are HP DVxxxx or TXxxxx machines, and thats because they die if you look at them funny. Apples are sent to West Quay Apple store with an apologetic expression and a suggestion to take some lube.
1 - Cover your mobo (plain board, all extras not soldered demoved, esp. plastics and battery) with tin foil (aluminium, really)
2 - Place your covered board in a convection oven at 150ºC for 2 hours, placed in the middle of the oven, NO GRILL
3 - Le it slowly regain ambient temperature, reomove foil and use as new. Board repaired.
The process has to do with the difussion ressoldering of the cracks in the solder joints produced by crystalization.
I discovered this when I came to install an SSD in my Vostro 1220. Expecting a10 minute experience similar to their Latitude series, I ended having to half-disassemble the bugger!
And after all that the bloody thing hammered the battery life so much I ended up going back to the original 250GB 7200rpm HD...
I vividly remember the Toshiba offerings of the very early 90's. Those had the charming feature that when you opened them they exploded to double the size, making 'em nigh on impossible to reassemble. The parts physically wouldn't fit into the case unless you were an octopus and able to exert inward force from eight directions at once.
when they decide they can make it even thinner by eliminating what little key travel there is by replacing the screen with a touchscreen. They'll then claim this as a 'magical and revoluionary' innovation; with a lawsuit against Nintendo for the DS for patent infringement being the only acknowledgment that the DS has a similar arrangement.
I'd rather have a subnote with a close to 10 hour battery life that costs less with a bigger SSD. For me, my Eee does fine. See, I got grunt desktop muscle when needed, don't need that much cpu throughput on the move, truth be told. Just need reliability, endurance and just enough grunt which my Eee more than supplies. Not as thin but just as portable.
But you're darn right. Looks shiny and stupendously well put together.
I've got 2 Mac lappies and I have to say I have had about as much trouble with them as I've had with my Asus'es.. ie very little. I find Apple lappies generally above par but...
Wouldn't buy an air all the same, too costly. And... it's still too new. Never an early adopter be... Especially for something so small, compact, unservicable and costly. Who knows what sort of problems we'll see down the road. Heat? Component failure?
And of course, Steve Jobs and Apple are getting really annoying... But credit where credit is due, sometimes Apple make really good kit (and sometimes NOT, iMacs are crap).
If you must buy one... wait a bit for the early adopting end-user reports to come in. Let them do the testing first ;)
Has anybody actually looked at the benchmark numbers for Intel's newer chips? The C2D is not THAT much slower than an i3, GHz for GHz. Maybe 10-20% slower. I doubt you would be able to tell the difference. If somebody told you the new Air had an i3, you'd be perfectly happy with it.
Also, 1.4GHz is not a death sentence. What's the fastest chip you could reasonably hope for in such a form factor? 2GHz? If something takes 5 seconds with a 2GHz chip, it will take 7 seconds with the 1.4GHz chip. Are those 2 seconds really killing you?
Personally I think the slower CPU is terrific. I have a MacBook that gets uncomfortably hot and loud when doing CPU-intensive things. I would gladly wait a little longer if it meant my laptop stayed cool and quiet.
CPU is more than perky enough for what it is, and there's a suprising amount of screen real estate once you shift the dock to the side like it should be.
Touch pad is noticeably smaller than the 13" models but the profile of the machine is awesome, no cutting into your wrists, it's more like a standalone keyboard ergonomically.
It's light but not as light as it looks, but thats only because it looks like it's going to float away.
Lack of sleep light I can understand given the month of standby but omitting the IR sensor and keyboard backlighting is a bit of a downer.
Finally, just want to say a big thank you to whoever fixed up the mobe version of this site, fantastic job sirperson, may I buy you a beer?
You can see the SSD controller in the higher res images on on the original site. Toshiba SSD controllers are just about the worst out there (with the exception of the tragic early attempts by JMicron,) and the lack of other options is plenty of reason for me not to buy one of these. Shame, since the size and price weren't too far off what I would expect to be reasonable.
-> No upgrade-ability and no user-maintenance-ability
-> Only Apple authorized persons are allowed to change parts/repair for much $$$/€€€
-> & bad connectivity inclusive
Typically Apple -> pure (expansive) lifestyle toy
Apple is getting more and more a replacement religion.
iLove ( ;-) ) standard-(IBM compatible)-PC/notebook
but to me the SSD module looks plainly like a Mini PCI-E card, which were pretty standard with oldish Netbooks (back in the good old days when they still had SSDs and running Linux instead of HDs with Windows on them). Nothing you kids have ever seen, of course.
According to some benchmarks from Ars this SSD is a fast one, by the way.
I have to say - that was what made me sad...
I have an original 1.6 MBA in my apple 'garage'... its ok for holidays and stuff when I don't need the 17" MBP, but once you try playing say gopro 1080p footage it maxes out the CPU and stutters to a halt. Obviously editing them in FCP or imovie is equally frustrating.
However, I popped in to apple today with a USB drive with some straight 1080p gopro mp4 H264 footage to see if it would play it....
F**K me if it didn't play it smooth as a babys ass cheeks - and with only about 15% CPU usage ( I remind you - this is a 1.4 core duo - and I've not done any fancy crap like I do on my PCs like use the right version of MPC-HC and feck out to try to get it to do some hardware acceleration.
And, as ars technica has pointed out the flash memory speed is absolutely mentally quick (160MB/sec).
Now, granted, when it comes to something that actually needs raw horsepower still - like ENCODING 1080p (at least for now under OSX that doesn't use the GPU) you are going to feel that 1.4ghz slowness, but seriously I could not believe how responsive it is just down to the flash memory
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"I have an urge to show that I'm far too cool to bother about Apple, so I'll just resort to name-calling about those who actually use & appreciate the machines".
I suppose you would berate Ferrari on the grounds that their latest offering won't let you fasten a plough to it and ready a field for sowing - and a 'proper' car MUST have a manual advance-retard lever, a starting-handle and acetylene headlamps.
If you think it's unsuitable for your needs - then don't buy it.
The thought that only those who are in accord with your line of thinking are normal, and those who dare to disagree automatically qualify for insulting invective is not something which I would recognise as a sign of mature or reasoned discourse.
The Department of Justice should start going after companies that can't justify making a part hard to replace or upgrade in a computer - the way Apple, of course, did with the very first Macintosh, making it hard to upgrade from 128 K to 512 K - treating this as an anti-competitive act in violation of antitrust law.
Since Macintosh has a monopoly on OS X systems, people who prefer that operating system to Windows don't have the latitude to just buy a different brand of computer. So it looks like the government will have to be the one to beat them over the head - somehow, the message has to get out that this kind of conduct is not tolerated.
Using new, unusual screws on the MacBook Air is not a violation of anti-trust law unless Apple claims copyright over the screw-head and sues anyone who tries to make a compatible driver without its permission. It would also have to offer an upgrade service of its own.
Now, I don't like Apple sticking new screws on the machine any more than you do, but that don't make the company's action anti-competitive.
If it was going to try that, the first thing it would do would be to slap a 'no user-serviceable parts inside' sticker on the base, just like so many consumer electronics parts have.
I have one of these drivers and the torque that can be applied is greater than you would normally be able to apply without stripping the head.
I have gone to insert tips on my T6, T8 & T10 because the manufacturers screw them in so tight that you can end up stripping the head breaking the driver or both.
You are just used to the relatively unusual situation with PCs where hardware and software is very mix-and-match.
Are you also up in arms that, for example, many (most?) car repairs require special parts and/or tools that are only available from the manufacturer? Should the government step in and mandate that it should be easy to swap a Chevy engine into a Ford, for example?
It looks like it is heading, at least at the hardware level, towards the iPhone model. If Apple were a car maker, they'd be selling cars with the hoods welded shut, have a governor on it so you can only drive as fast as Apple thinks you should, can only use fuel purchased from an Apple dealer, and that can only run on special roads owned & approved by Apple.
> at iFixit, who bagged one of the svelte ultra-portable notebooks and promptly vivisected it.
No they didn't, unless they took it apart whilst it was still on. Vivisection is cutting stuff up whilst the subject is still alive. You mean dissected.
Which makes me wonder, does the stuff iFixIt takes apart still work once they put it back together again?
> The screw you pictured looks like a non-security torx
Maybe, secure Torx heads usually have a lump in the middle to stop you getting anything apart from a secure Torx driver in there. These don't have that, but they aren't standard six-thingy Torx screws.
Alan.
> What's with the three sizes/shapes of batteries?
Apple has developed it's own special battery chemistry and charging circuitry that means the batteries last ~1,000 full charge cycles (about 3x the norm). Because they have to make the batteries anyway, their design choices aren't constrained by standard battery form factors. They are exploiting an opportunity to assist with the miniaturisation.
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