Some see a new Apple product and merely gaze at it and drink in its beauty. Others look at the same object and think, “How the hell do I pop this puppy open?” iFixit has performed one of its patented teardowns on the new 11-inch MacBook Pro, and found a smaller SSD, with a slightly larger battery that provides longer life.
The new 11-inch Air, like the new 13-inch Air, features a smaller SSD module and a new heat sink clamp, iFixit found in the course of its teardown. The ultralight notebook also features an improved battery outputting at 7.6V with 5100mAh.
The new power source weighs in at 8.08 oz and is rated at 38.75 hours. A bit of a bump up over last year’s model, which came in at 7.9 oz and was rated at 35 watt-hours. The new battery can provide up to nine hours of operation, versus last year’s power source, which could give up to five hours of use before giving out.
The new battery isn’t the only factor behind the added longevity in the Air, a big hunk of the praise should go to Intel’s new line of Haswell processors. Intel said their new power-saving lineup would allow up to 50% longer battery life in notebook, a claim borne out by Apple’s new notebook lineup.
An updated SSD module also comes as standard equipment in the new 11-inch Air, as it sports a SanDisk module containing a Marvell PCIe SSD controller and 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM from Samsung.
iFixit gave the 11-inch MacBook Air the same poor repairability score that was bestowed on its big brother, “achieving” a 4/10 score. iFixit says the device’s proprietary Pentalobe screws, as well as the soldered-in RAM and non-upgradeable components led to the low score.
