MacBook Air 2018 Teardown
ifixit.com
ifixit.com
Have the MacBook and MacBook air "switched"?
The MacBook has one USB-C port, has a smaller 12" screen, and is lighter (2 lbs).
The MacBook Air has two Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports, has a 13" screen, is heavier (2.75 lbs), and has more CPU power than the MacBook.
The MBP w/o touch bar has two Thunderbolt (USB-C) ports, a 13" screen, is heavier (3 lbs), and more CPU power than the Air
The MBP w/ touch bar has four Thunderbolt (USB-C) ports, a 13" screen and has more CPU power (options) than the MBP w/o touch bar (same weight).
(I intentionally left out the 15" MBP)
Their line-up is quite a mess. I don't see why they haven't updated the MacBook Pro without touch bar or the MacBook 12". If you want a MacBook Pro without a touch bar, you are basically screwed, unless you can accept a potentially unreliable keyboard.
The MacBook Pro with touchbar received a slightly updated keyboard that is supposed to fix some of the issues people had with the old one.
The Air is 100$ cheaper, and has the TouchId scanner and the newer-gen keyboard.
The Pro has a 15W TDP vs 7W TDP CPU with slightly higher performance, and a TrueTone display with higher brightness.
I would probably pay the 8% extra, but overall those things are very close.
I suspect this is because Apple gives so little attention to Mac now and updates products two or three times a decade. So when one product is updated, the rest of the lineup seems incongruous.
Just the overall design — there are substantial internal updates (silicon, battery, etc.) every 12-18 months for most lines. Air had been waiting a while, though.
> heavier (and has more ports) ... I suspect this is because Apple gives so little attention to Mac now
A simpler explanation: There's a market for a laptop somewhere between MB and MBP.
Any chance Apple will back out on the touch bar for MBP's — "We've learned from that experience."? I have one and am not thrilled with the touch bar, but I really prefer fingerprint unlocking over typing a password.
It allows you to fully customise the buttons making it infinitely more useful.
I just walk up to my desk, tap the space bar and the watch and mac do their thing and I'm logged in. It's awesome.
> MacID 2.0 is now available has been renamed to Unlox.
I suppose you could argue that if you then forced people to use longer, more complex passwords, they would have fewer issues.
We could call the latter "Macbook (void)" - void is lighter than air ...
I can say that having traveled for months with a 12" MacBook it was a great little machine for what I wanted (collecting photos, checking mail and the web, and writing lots of code in Emacs). I plan to get another and make my 15" MBP behemoth a desktop.
I don't mind the RAM. There's only two options upfront: 8GB and 16GB and I know what I need. The non-serviceable storage however, even with the Thunderbolt 3 ports for external storage (because who wants external storage on a laptop), is a bummer.
I just recently upgraded an 11" Air from 128 GB SSD to 1 TB SSD. It seems that storage demands only go up over time; that's much less so the case with RAM or CPU these days.
It has been getting better as people work the bugs out of their SSD controllers, but it does mean the whole laptop is garbage if the MLC flash chip craps out.
I have an 11" that I would be interested in upgrading, but was unaware there were compatible parts like that.
You _must_ upgrade the Mac to High Sierra or Mojave before doing this. The upgrade to High Sierra upgrades the boot firmware adding NVMe support. I made sure my Mac was upgraded and had a time machine backup. I then installed the new SSD, booted from a USB flash drive with the Mojave installer, formatted the drive with Disk Utility, then restored from the Time Machine backup. More details here[3].
I've had it installed a couple weeks and don't have any issues with it. Sleep, hibernate, everything works perfectly. No crashes. It may be a little warmer when in heavy use, but I'm not sure. I can't say if it's affected battery life because I'm not mindful about how long the batter lasts. I also didn't run any performance testing on the old drive or new, but I didn't notice any changes.
[0] http://eshop.sintech.cn/ngff-m2-pcie-ssd-card-as-2013-2014-2...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BN217QG/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0743CK4SF/
[3] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/287644/do-macbooks...
http://eshop.sintech.cn/ngff-m2-pcie-ssd-card-as-2013-2014-2...
I've considered adding SDXC 512GB card to the SDXC slot to expand storage, less thing to lug around than an external Thunderbolt drive.
20 years ago, when we were collectively trying to squeeze more and more out of personal computers at a fairly decent clip, it made some sense. At this point, though, things have tapered off outside of a few special cases like large-scale data crunching and serious gaming, neither of which was ever really a primary use case for Macs in the first place.
What's left for reasons why you might need ever more RAM are things that feel kind of silly. On my personal computer, the big RAM suckers in recent memory have been ad-heavy news websites and (bafflingly) the Slack desktop app. In both cases, I'm pretty sure the reason why they get away with sucking more and more RAM is that we're rolling over and buying more RAM instead of putting some more pressure on software developers about being wasteful.
I rather wish Grace Hopper were still around to give a memory consumption version of her "nanoseconds" lecture.
Part of this is due to increasing DRAM densities, and used to be a good thing with Macs - frequently the device's practical maximum RAM would be twice what Apple listed as possible, since the DRAM density doubles between the time the machine is released and you actually need to upgrade the machine. However, with the RAM now soldered, we can't benefit from the increasing densities right as we start needing more RAM.
When I upgraded, I bought a Skylake laptop with 16GB of socketed RAM and the option with the CPU to increase that to 64GB down the line. 32GB SO-DIMMs only became possible this year.
I've read that Apple's limits of 16GB were usually down to power draw, that adding more RAM would require more power, thus bigger batteries to keep up the marketing battery life, and it was easier to just limit the RAM to '16GB is enough'.
That all said, I cannot deny that modern applications are RAM guzzlers and developers seem to revel in the glut of available memory. Still, there are situations where you need all that RAM (e.g. multi-k video production... perhaps that's where the 'Pro' in MacBook Pro came from?!), and you just can't get around that requirement.
I think developers are still chasing the ‘write once run anywhere’ Holy Grail. This time it’s JavaScript.
The other 2-3GB (I'm not even kidding) seemed to be a result of keeping a copy every single attachment and Giphy image that anyone posts in memory, indefinitely. Like with any good memory leak, the solution was to bounce the application.
I use vscode quite a bit, and it doesn't eat RAM in a way that seems reminiscent of what people like to blame on Electron apps. Perhaps what we like to lay at the feet of Electron is more appropriately blamed on there being a lot of JavaScript developers who haven't been sufficiently educated in how to manage memory.
At least RAM is likely to be good as long as the rest of the system.
I know people use it to store VM images and run them off the flash disk.
Just don’t insert them into a non-Mac, you’ll have a fun time pulling them out.
Just a couple dollars from Asia from your favourite online auction house.
I can kind of understand, at least when space is at such a premium as it is in a MacBook Air, soldering everything onto a single logic board. But why not allow that logic board to be upgraded?
While it would be very un-Apple to offer upgrade kits to end users, I could very easily see the company offering upgrades as a Genius service (maybe also selling the parts to authorized service providers). You’d go to an Apple store, pay the upgrade price for a logic board with more storage or RAM (or a faster CPU), come back in an hour or two, and your MacBook would be waiting for you with the upgrade.
It could be a huge green PR coup for Apple, as well as a way to drive post-sale revenue.
One could change their 2gb logic board for a 4gb.
3rd parties should be able to do it.
Under Cooks leadership they are doing everything they can to squeeze every last dollar from their customer base in a masterclass of price, strategy and product positioning and the supposed value proposition (touchbar, etc) is often dubious at best.
Lifespan isn't just about repairability, if something doesn't fail then you don't need to take it apart.
The “non-repairability” does mean old units get harvested for parts instead of scrapped for aluminum.
When I’m ready to upgrade, i’ve Sold the still-usable parts and funded a substantial cost of buying the new version.
For any poor soul who has had to do mobile development work on one of these, the ‘you are low on risk space’ notification is like a spectre that haunts dreams.
The environmental impact alone of non-upgradeable units is a serious issue in my eyes. Previous Macs have lasted me up to 8 years or so with nice and consistent upgrades over the years.
The small amount of thinness or whatever it is has been the trade off is not worth it.
We’ve lost the exterior battery button, we’ve lost MagSafe, the butterfly keyboards have had scathing reviews at best, and, in what seems like the most open statement of ‘we’re not even the same company any more’, they’ve even removed lost the trademark glowing Apple on the back.
It has moved beyond the point where I need to draw the line and will be building the most compatible hackintosh I can as my next laptop.
Furthermore, a MacBook Pro, which one could certainly call a development machine, still starts with a baseline, non-upgradeable 128GB unit.
Virtually no ‘pro’ task, Image Editing, Software Develoment, Video Editing, Audio Editing, that Macs have typically and historically been used for, are suited to these 128GB drives and create machines that need to be thrown out and add to e-waste instead of having any meaningful longevity.
I know this because I do these types of tasks all the time, and was forced into a 2017 13” MBP with a 128GB SSD and paltry 8GB of RAM earlier this year due to having it given to me as a work machine. Using it was an unpleasant experience unlike any computer I’d used, much less a Mac.
And why? For aesthetic purposes? For greed/profit? What’s the use of their ‘all-aluminum’ eco-friendly goals, if they create machines that intentionally have a 3-4 year shelf life baked into them? It’s mind-boggling.
We pay a premium for Apple devices, and more and more, especially as the prices seem to constantly be creeping upwards at this point, the conscessions we need to make to use them have become far greater than the benefits.
RIP Apple computers. Hello, Apple, Inc.
Hahaha, my Acer laptop from 2008 had 160GB storage space, and it was not much by the standards of the time.
So no, we're still not back to 2008-level storage space needs on a laptop.
Apple has turned their products from some of the most high-class computers and devices on the planet, to, it seems, greed and drivel.
Their push to increase revenues on a per-unit basis as opposed to reaching more customers will leave them incredibly exposed when someone else finally comes along and builds a laptop that developers are happy with at a fraction of the cost of whatever the next gen-MBPs are priced at. It might not be next year, but they're not gonna be beloved forever if they keep this up.
You can get a lighter and much more powerful Lenovo or Dell laptop but not for what you would normally call a fraction.
And despite their good build quality, neither the masses nor the Mac complainers are buying XPS's or X1's. The reason is of course that they are neither universally better not significantly cheaper.
Apple is still by far the best at things that are hard to put on a spec sheet, while Lenovo and Dells spec sheets are kicking Apples ass.
And you are not going to see things change or a new player come in and take this market, because the market for laptops is shrinking. This is why apple is trying to increase revenue per unit and unit churn rate. Us premium laptop users are becoming a niche.
It of course came with Windows 10 and that's the rub, it's a crap shoot since I knew I'd be able to get Linux to work fine I just didn't know how much work (if any) would be required.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Happy with the new MacBook Pro (32gb of ram!) but part of me regrets not waiting a few weeks and grabbing the new Air.
If I was stuck with the original 120gb HDD and the stock 4gb of RAM it would be in no way 'usable' as it is now.
I was lucky in that the model I had allowed an EFI upgrade (I think?) a few years ago which enabled the 16gb ram.
I use a new 15' Macbook in the office and I have with-drawl symptoms with that new keyboard. Nice machines though, just a pity they are not serviceable.
The Apple keyboards were designed to be thin at the expense of everything else, reliability, maintainence, longevity, and comfort.
I'm just not a keyboard connoisseur, it seems.
The two class action lawsuits against Apple for the butterfly switches however is some objective proof that something has gone terribly wrong.
It sounds like the new keyboard is more reliable, but IMO this is an unacceptably bad design. I say that as a person who really likes the "feel" of the new keys, incidentally.
I've been harping on about this for years now: If it's true that Apple sees Macs as "like trucks" (and thus iOS devices as the cars that most people need), they need to make Macs… like trucks!
[edit] these "pull-able glue strips" are a big step back in the right direction, at least
And they mention having to remove the logic board to replace the battery as a downside.
They've even issued a few. This one is for a phone. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/ifixit-gives-modular...
It’s nice to see this machine have a more sane design.
It was always a bummer to tell people that a bad battery meant replacing the entire upper case.
Usually when companies glue parts together inside electronics they use rubber cement, which can usually be peeled off without damaging the component or the housing. It's an inconvenience, not a roadblock to repair.
I can see why they wouldn't want the techs doing that in the store, one of the failure modes if you screw it up is a lithium fire. Also, if the battery had started to swell up it may have bent the case. Apple doesn't leave much room for expansion with their batteries anymore.
Got the $80 battery from ifixit and replaced the battery relatively easily. It did have me pour generous amounts for aceton (nail polish remover) into my MacBook to unglue the battery though, was happy that everything still worked after.
Though I had to use my 2013 Air recently while my 2017 MBP was in the shop (keyboard aka whole front panel + battery replacement) and wished they'd just kept the high-action keyboard that could weather the grime between cleanings.
It is new so we are still waiting to see if there are reports of Key malfunctioning after some longer period of use.
while the "PRO" macbook have a single usbC on 12", no fans, no f-keys, no escape key.
Apple is now a true Mainstream Consumer PC manufacturer! The models means nothing! Now you have to dive in model numbers and specific production runs to get what you want, just like buying Asus et al.
Non-touch bar has two ports. Touch bar has four.