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Comment by asplake | Hacker News Reader

This week I had the battery replaced in my mid 2013 Air. First time I’ve had a computer for anything like this long and not wanted to bin it. A bigger SSD and more RAM would be nice but it remains my ideal laptop. They were definitely on to something.

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Yup. My 2011 Air is my favorite machine ever. Getting a bit slow though, past year or so. Takes a long time to wake from sleep. Battery warning has been on forever.

The SSDs in the Air are replaceable, but new units are insanely expensive. I've been looking to swap out my 128GB SSD with a 256GB unit (Mid-2013 MBA). An OEM 256GB SSD is around $450, the OWC Aura (seemingly the only compatible third party unit) is $250 -- better, but still hard to justify. There are used units on eBay, but I don't like using second hand hard drives.

Are there any other options out there?

Pretty sure you can get an adapter to convert the world of M.2 drives into the MBA propietary plug. A little bit of Google-fu should connect you to it on popular online stores.

There are but there are some heavy caveats and they don't really work all that well. For example, I recently purchased one of these Sintech adapters[0] and a Samsung 960 Evo. NVMe drives are technically supported in the latest High Sierra, but clearly there are huge issues with the NVMe SSD drivers and OS X still. While I appreciated the higher speeds and capacity at a better price, ultimately having OSX hard reboot due to kernel panics two or three times a day made me give up on this experiment. I'll probably try it again sometime in the future though.

0. http://eshop.sintech.cn/storage-adapter-2013-mac-pcie-ssd-c-...

Last year, instead of replacing my mid-2011’s battery for a few hundred dollars, I sold all the parts and bought a mid-2015 with faster CPU and 8GB RAM.

After selling the included Beats Solo3 (academic purchase), it was close to a free upgrade.

Is this to say you deconstructed the machine and sold individual parts (on eBay)?

I'm surprised doing so would have such a good return.

Yes. Apple keeps a tight grip on its supply chain, so spare parts are hard to find.

But I think I sold the wifi card to someone building a hackintosh.

Are they that expensive? I mean, after a quick Google I couldn't find anything with a huge price[1]. That WiFi card goes for £13.

I'm interested (and I'm sure others would be), where did you sell the parts and did you use any disassembly guides?

1. https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/Genuine-Apple-MacBook-Pro-Early-201...

I just pointed out that part as being one that could go into any computer.

Sold the parts on everyone's favourite auction house. Lots of repair guides out there, I used ifixit's.

Even though it's a 2011, lots of bricked systems out there that you can get functioning again for $0-$200 dollars in spare parts and a few hours of your time.

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