15” MacBook Air Teardown | Hacker News Reader

15” MacBook Air Teardown

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47 pointstosh53 comments

Off-topic - I love the fact that Apple takes care to make the insides look as nice as the outside. Everything from the layout to the boards looks so good.

It always looked good, but I’m honestly impressed how tetris-like their design has became. It truly feels like there’s no wasted volume in there. That being said, it’s all horrible from the repairability point of view.

Apple is really inconsistent and more than a touch schizophrenic about this.

The laptops get scores of 2~4 (the touchbar iterations were an amazing 1, you have to look for the Surface Laptop or an orange to get worse), meanwhile the iphone 14 debuted a new design which earned a 7.

They design to meet their internal (supply chain and exec decision) constraints and considerations. Sometimes those factors align with ifixit’s scores, but that’s more likely a coincidence.

>Apple is really inconsistent and more than a touch schizophrenic about this.

>The laptops get scores of 2~4 (the touchbar iterations were an amazing 1, you have to look for the Surface Laptop or an orange to get worse), meanwhile the iphone 14 debuted a new design which earned a 7.

I'm more optimistic than sudhirj. There is a longstanding trend in Apple, going back to the Apple II versus Macintosh 128K, of alternating between open and sealed designs. As just one of many, many examples: The iBook G3 (not the clamshell)? Very sealed. iBook G4? Quite open, despite its exterior having very few changes.

reminds me of some audiophile brands, the innards were so clean and symmetrical..

Don't see how this is off-topic.

It's something they started focusing more on I want to say some point in the early-mid 2000s.

The innards of the PowerMac G4 towers and PowerBook/iBook G4s weren't very nice looking, and the latter were an absolute nightmare to disassemble with 3x as many screws as seen in the video above.

Where that changed was with the PowerMac G5 and iMac G5 on the desktop side of things and the unibody MacBooks on the portable side. The internals of the first couple revisions of 20" iMac G5 in particular were very nice both aesthetically and from a serviceability standpoint, which they unfortunately degraded with later revisions by making it necessary to remove the screen to access internals.

The early ibooks designs were outsourced, to asus I believe.

I remember they were dangerous to repair as the screw lengths were all different and you could screw a long screw into a short hole which would cut into some pcb traces.

Interesting, do you know if that applies to the fruit colored models or the later white ones?

I disassembled a white iBook G4 ages ago and it was a real mess to take apart.

was either the g3 or g4 ibook (my g3 was such a lemon it got replaced with a g4)

Probably you already know this, but it was a Steve Jobs thing:

Growing up, Jobs once helped his father build a fence around their family home in Mountain View. While working, Paul shared a piece of advice with Jobs: “You’ve got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.”

The idea stuck with Jobs.

While at the helm of Apple, Jobs insisted that every element of the Macintosh computer be beautiful, down to the circuit boards inside.

“Look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together,” Jobs said of the circuits in Isaacson’s biography.

[…]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/how-steve-jobs-developed-his...

Watching this video I just assumed the logic board removal was some aside, not necessary to replace the battery. Nope! Looking at their 13" guide this entire process is necessary to perform a battery replacement. Given everything else is solid state and will probably never fail it makes even less sense to block battery replacement behind them. The Air is an awesome device to use but wow... what a terrible design for battery replacement.

Yeah bit strange with the future EU rules calling for user replaceable batteries.

This would likely still pass muster under that ruling. They don’t specify that it has to be trivial, just that it has to be doable without specialty tools.

... for replacement. Batteries have sensitive thermal requirements, so im sure there is a reason for the layout the wayy it is.

The reason is most likely just that there was no consideration in the design process for designing for serviceability. It’s surprisingly easy to design for repair without sacrificing other attributes if you include that in your design goals from the start.

On what basis do you say easy to repair doesn't involve sacrificing other attributes? I've seen the Fairphone and it's a chunky one.

We sell a laptop that is the same thickness and weight as a MacBook Pro 13-inch, in which every part is trivially replaceable using one tool.

I was going with "oh yes? Show me what you sell" then I clicked on your username. You are doing an amazing job!

Does it also have the same build quality, performance, battery life and price?

Do you also sell tens of millions of them per year?

There's been enough HN threads where people bought framework laptops only to ditch them a few weeks after as they are nowhere near a macbook no matter how much you try to oversell it.

It’s unclear if you’re looking for a discussion in good faith, but, here are The Verge’s reviews of the most recent MacBook Pro 13-inch and Framework Laptop as reference points:

https://www.theverge.com/23177674/apple-macbook-pro-m2-2022-...

https://www.theverge.com/23725039/framework-laptop-13-2023-i...

Those links only serve my point. Macbook destroys framework in terms of battery life and dominates in performance benchmarks. Oddly, also in games. Though I wouldn't play Shadow of Tomb Raider on either of them. Also, it has better build quality than the framework laptop.

And is it as capable as well? Because I can also put some shitty decades old hardware and shitty battery into any thin case, that’s not a meaningful comparison.

>Given everything else is solid state and will probably never fail

Huh? Solid state drives do certainly fail, especially consumer parts.

Ideally, IF Apple were to source the best NAND silicone for reliability, and IF they had the best wear leveling algos implemented in NAND controller FW, and IF MacOS had optimal IO for write calls, and IF the soldering, temperatures, and voltage regulation to the NAND and controller were to be kept within ideal spec, then we could safely assume they might never fail, but that's a lot of IFs, and is why SSDs still fail quite a bit despite no moving parts.

Which is why I refuse to buy PCs/laptops with soldered storage. That's like buying a car with the brake pads permanently attached to the chassis.

Not often these days, and if you want them to really last the trick is to oversize them. If you need 2TiB get 4. That’s because wear is a function of amount written divided by the size or the drive due to wear leveling.

For most people this advice doesn’t matter but if you do work on your laptop that involves tons and tons of writes (e.g. local Docker work with lots of huge container builds and multiple VMs) then over provisioning is good.

It’s also very good advice for any server deployment you want to be reliable. If I were deploying a good old fashioned database box to be super reliable I’d oversize the SSD as much as possible (coupled with hot swap and mirroring).

“Just buy 2x what you need” is not exactly equal to “it’s super reliable and never fail”.

Redundancy is a perfectly reasonable way to achieve reliability

Yes, it’s a reasonable way to achieve reliably of the whole system, as long as you have infinite money.

They do, but it's uncommon. Having been using SSDs since at least 2011 or so, they've had a vastly better track record for me than HDDs have. In fact I have yet to see a single SSD of mine fail, whereas plenty of my HDDs have corrupted files or died.

This probably varies from person to person though. Someone who's shuffling around tens or hundreds of gigabytes a video per day for example probably burns through them much more quickly than I do, with the most disk intensive thing I do being software development.

Opposite experience from me. Never had a HDD fail ( I still have drives from the mid '00's running), but seen many SSDs fail, especially among the fleets at the companies I worked at, less so in my private life as I don't upgrade that often to have a large sample size.

And the SSD fails were AFAIK never due to excessive wear from the user side but simply the SSD giving up the ghost out of nowhere probably due to faulty FW or faults in the NAND fabrication of RAM of the cache. SSD have enough points of failure despite no moving parts.

HDDs would also fail more gracefully, like you'd usually get SMART warnings, crashes, strange noises before they'd inevitably die, but SSD simply just stop working one day out of the blue.

I wonder if make and model of SSD factors in. Generally I've only purchased SSDs that have been proven reliable and don't try to cut costs by going for cheaper options with mystery meat controllers or cut rate NAND.

As far as failing gracefully, for me HDDs have been a mixed bag. Some have shown warning signs beforehand but I've had a few that just up and died one day with their performance up until that point having been business as usual.

MTBF of samsung flash parts is allegedly around 1.5Mh. That's one in 171 years. A battery, on the other hand, is (almost) guaranteed to need replacement after ~2000 cycles, or 32kh. That's a difference of 46x.

SSDs fail not because of their NAND reaching MTBF. That would be the perfect world if that was the only variable.

This is MTBF of the entire drive (I used a Samsung 980 MTBF for reference). I think it's pretty clear that, barring accidental damage, the battery is by far the most likely failure point on macbooks.

It is, but I've seen enough laptops go back to the IT department due to SSDs randomly dying on them way before their batteries died or them reaching their claimed MTBF which mostly applies to laboratory controlled conditions, not real world usage.

Same with my old corporate HP. SSD (SK Hynix) died within one year.

That's the point of the M in MTBF: it's a mean. Some drives underperform, others overperform. One sampling from Backblaze shows this MTBF to be (roughly) accurate: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-...

Another comparison (by proxy): https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Batteries should last for years more than previous generations. Battery life is so good I only charge at most once a day.

Everyone loves to hate on Apple and their glue, but it's got to be hard to balance durability with repairability, especially at the volume that Apple ships.

Apple is not the biggest laptop producer - hp, lenovo, dell has been shipping each year more than apple.

ThinkPads are actually durable and easily repairable and even upgradable and they sell much cheaper and with smaller margin.

You would expect that apple with bigger R&D, bigger product price and much bigger margin would focus more on repairability by itself instead of waiting for EU to force it's hand.

Their price and margin comes from the thinness, lightness and solidness, all of which reduce repairability.

Excluding current m1 and m2 generations and going back 2-3 years back what did you get?

Laptops that keyboards was breaking and to replace it you had to remove the whole top of laptop for like couple of hundreds of dollars. Hard drive soldered with price for 1TB around $1k with even backup port removed in case of failor. Battery glued.

I used to have thinkpad x1 extreme gen 2 which price was $1.5k, 2x nmve slots, 2x removable ram up to 64gb ram. Battery removable with just a screws. Wifi module replaceable and could be upgraded. Display could be replaced and upgraded. Durable case from carbon fiber. Solid keyboard with even track point. And was still very lightweight - because carbon case.

As someone who owns both a MacBook and a ThinkPad, while the construction of ThinkPads (at least "real" ThinkPads, not in-brand-only models) is solid they often leave something desired in terms of case flex. I'm comfortable holding my 16" M1 Max MBP by its corner while it's open because it doesn't flex at all, while I'm more nervous doing that with my X1 Nano despite it being much more lightweight.

If you would talk about macbook air i could agree but in your case I also have 16" MBP and they are simply to heavy (2kg, almost as heavy as MBP 15" 2012 unibody) and risky (to drop and waste $3k) to hold it by corners

The macs immediately before the M-series were shit. There are plenty of shitty thinkpads as well. Let’s take the current macs into account, which are unbeatable in performance/battery life and it is not even funny by how far they are ahead of the competition.

> You would expect that apple with bigger R&D, bigger product price and much bigger margin would focus more on repairability by itself instead of waiting for EU to force it's hand.

Why would you expect that? If the EU is going to mandate something, it’s in Apple’s best interest to wait for them to mandate it and build it so that it’s compliant. Otherwise, there’s a risk that they could make something “repairable” by the own standard but does not meet EU standards, forcing another redesign to do something they didn’t want to do to begin with.

It’s also much easier to handle any criticisms in the design when they are forced upon you. You can be certain that Apple is thrilled that the EU forced their hand on USB-C. They’re going to get a juicy bump in accessory sales with the format change, with none of the criticism that came with the switch from 30-pin. “The EU made us do it! We would happily have maintained compatibility with all the accessories you’ve bought over the past 12 years but gosh darn it, looks like you’ll need to re-buy.”

I expect apple have seen the writing is on the wall in EU just takes time to put into force so they started making design more repairable ahead of time to test design.

Yeah I'm thrilled about EU forcing apple to adopt usb-c. It's ridiculous they selling phones for $1k or even phones with 1TB for $1.5 with still usb 2.0 transfer speed.

And will be nice to use one cable to charge everything else and use cheap off-the-shelf Usb-c pendrive instead of MFI compliant pendrive or not needing to buy some dedicated dongles.

USB-C is not necessarily USB3, it’s also not even necessarily data.

I don’t know why people who care so much about usb-c support also happen to keep making that mixup.

The EU only mandated the port not the data portion. There’s tons of devices that use usb-c (android phones, other devices) that are usb-2 or no data at all.

> usb 2.0 transfer speed.

I haven’t transmitted data over a wire to my phone in 10 years.

I think the usb-c switch is just about consolidating all the different connectors and saving consumers money.

Lightning was created though because there was no good cord standard. MicroUSB really sucked. So it’s not that Apple is a jerk or anything, they just didn’t change when a decent standard emerged.

Never used cable to transfer anything from a phone. Just for charging. Don't like it? Don't buy it.

> ThinkPads are actually durable and easily repairable and even upgradable and they sell much cheaper and with smaller margin

Which ones? The newer models are not like that. Also, their battery life sucks ass, and they throttle like all hell. (I use one personally, but had one as a company device as well — now I’m actively looking for an M-series mac).

I thought the glue was something "acceptable" for repair-ability, the complaint is that you have to disassemble nearly everything just to get to remove the battery.

No, most of these fancy adhesives are hand applied. Screws on the other hand are perfectly automatable with enough investment into tooling.

A screw does not need feedback for being torqued to spec, but for glue, you need eyes to see if it sticks properly, and is not beading, and no other defects. And if there are defects, you need fingers for to wipe them.

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