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15-Inch MacBook Air Teardown Reveals Familiar Design and Upgraded Six-Speaker Sound System
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Most complaints center around the RAM / storage and how the effective starting price for a MacBook Air competitive on those is $1700. Still cheaper than a 16” Pro sure, but a good bit more than the advertised $1300.
Most people are happy about the price, even though it's very expensive in Europe (1600€)
Main issue , and probably the biggest reason why you see people "whining" is that it starts at 8gb/256 , both of which are quite insulting (especially if you take into account the fact that the new SSD is twice as slow as the MacBook air M1 , released 3 years ago )
Whenever I read a uniformed opinion I wonder if the person ever owned one of the early Mac laptops with replaceable batteries and memory. Those things were HEAVY and should have been registered as weapons. And yes on transatlantic flights I carried a second (expensive) battery cause I had to.. now I can fly transatlantic on one charge in a much lighter and easier to carry computer. So no thank you to what you think is ideal. You’re wrong
Steve Jobs has been dead for a decade. Time to stop bringing him up.
You call it insulting… tell me what you do that takes more, then tell me why if it is so necessary you can’t afford it. And don’t tell me about crappy xyz systems that have to sell themselves by having more. Quality costs. It’s as simple as that.
What I want the EU to do is either ban soldered SSDs and RAM to reduce e waste or demand that the manufacturer can't price memory/storage upgrades over 100% market rate instead of charging 800% going rate like Apple's current cost to go from 256gb to 1TB.
Layering the components in a different order than the one Apple chose turns the laptop into a time machine that transports you back to the 90s.
Alrighty then.
It's not too late, they're finally going to kill Lightning, soldered ram and ssds should be the next target.
So what you are saying is that I should have paid more for a 512GB SSD despite my wife not needing more than 150GB?
The difference between 256 and 512gb is about $10 in material costs. I'm sure a soon to be 2 trillion dollar company can afford to spend an extra $10 on their >$1000 macbooks.
Finished transferring all the files from the 13-in 2020 Intel-based MBA to the new 15-in. The speed increase is impressive, and as the article suggests the speakers are magnificent. Did a music comparison between the 2020 Intel MBA, the new 15-in MBA and my 16-in MBP. The MBP is still the best, but the 15-in MBA isn't far behind.
Went for Midnight Blue, happy to see a nice long colour-matched MagSafe power lead.
Went for Midnight Blue, happy to see a nice long colour-matched MagSafe power lead.
I don't want to go back to that. I'm okay with a battery that's built into the system.
But I'd like to be open the machine up myself and replace that battery without having to remove half the internal components. Ideally remove a couple of screws and disconnect the battery from the board, pull it out, put the new one in, reconnect it and close up the machine.
Hell, that's nearly how it is on iPhones. I understand that going back to batteries that you can swap without opening the machine would hurt the form factor. But Apple should be able to make batteries user replaceable (even if you need a screwdriver) without it being such a massive hassle.
Totally agree, the speakers on my M1 air sound incredible for it’s size, and the soundstage is really wide.
When my partner was looking at Macbooks we listened to the M1 and M2 back to back at the Apple store and both thought the M1 sounded better, likely because of the grills
Yeah ,really sad what "beautiful design" leads to
But let me guess, he still ended up with the M2 , didn't he ?
)I'm a huge advocate for right to repair, but this is not a useful case to prove the need for it.
The only reasons I can think of is thermal management and housing strength. Those would certainly be valid reasons.
This battery swap requires only the most rudimentary skills, as the steps are very simple and straightforward. There is no reason to regulate that there cannot be a multi-step procedure to replace a battery.
Regardless, right to repair will make no headway if aftermarket battery makers continue to sell thousands of poor battery packs that fail to meet customer quality expectations. Without a market that can begin compete on quality, right to repair is doomed to fail. 3rd party repair shops see this dire situation every day. I had my own repair shop... until the aftermarket parts quality market tanked. "Free" rework expenses due to shoddy parts can kill a business.
am I a bad producer if I think the speakers Apple has been putting on their upper-tier laptops are great for making music demos?
you obviously need monitors or at LEAST high-quality headphones (e.g. Sennheisers) for mixing/mastering—but producing in Ableton, just shootin the s—t with synths and drums using my M2 MBP speakers in a “plug and play” type style, has been wonderful. so much less hollow-sounding than my previous model (an early 2015).
you obviously need monitors or at LEAST high-quality headphones (e.g. Sennheisers) for mixing/mastering—but producing in Ableton, just shootin the s—t with synths and drums using my M2 MBP speakers in a “plug and play” type style, has been wonderful. so much less hollow-sounding than my previous model (an early 2015).
Yesterday I got to see the MBA 15 in the flesh for the first time. The screen size is absolutely perfect for me, the weight is great and to my eyes the laptop is just simply gorgeous. Can't wait to place an order in the coming days.
One day these will be $999 13" and 1199 15" I'll wait to buy
Repair website iFixit today shared a 15-inch MacBook Air teardown on YouTube, offering a closer look inside the laptop. As expected, the 15-inch MacBook Air has a similar internal design as the 13-inch model, with the only notable difference being two extra speakers.
Image Credit: iFixit
"The new 15-inch MacBook Air also features a phenomenal new six-speaker sound system with two tweeters and two sets of force-cancelling woofers," said Apple. "The new speakers deliver twice the bass depth for fuller sound, and Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos provides immersive experiences whether listening to music or watching movies."
The battery is also larger, but Apple says battery life is equal to the 13-inch model. As with the 13-inch model, the battery cells have adhesive pull tabs for easier removal, but the battery can only be accessed after several other components are disassembled.
The teardown offers a look at the 15-inch MacBook Air's logic board with the M2 chip and a single NAND chip for the 256GB model, which can result in slower SSD read and write speeds compared to 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB models.
Like other Apple laptops, iFixit said the 15-inch MacBook Air is very difficult to repair. In addition, RAM and storage cannot be upgraded after purchase.
Key advantages of the 15-inch MacBook Air over the 13-inch model include a larger display, larger trackpad, and six speakers instead of four. Both models have the M2 chip for equal performance, and very similar battery life. Apple began accepting orders for the 15-inch MacBook Air last week, and the laptop launched on Tuesday.
Article Link: 15-Inch MacBook Air Teardown Reveals Familiar Design and Upgraded Six-Speaker Sound System
I like my HiFi stuff but the sound projection on my MBP16" is just spooky. Beats me how they achieved so much immersion.
I ran out and bought the early 2020 Intel Macbook Air when the transition to Apple Silicon was first announced later that year concerned about losing the ability to boot into Windows for some apps I have to run at work. Now that things have shaken out and we can run the ARM version of Windows 11 in Parallels while using its x86 and x86-64 emulation layer to get most Windows only based apps running combined with CrossOver / Wine, CrossOver’s coming Direct X 12 compatibility layer and now the Apple Game Developer Toolkit to run games I’m totally open to going the Apple Silicon route.
The 15” MacBook Air would be right up my alley but why buy now when an M3 version will likely be here in the next year? I might as well hold off until that next iteration.
Hopefully the Apple Game Developer Toolkit will be embraced enough by developers to allow the Mac gaming enthusiast community to get games running that developers don’t want to officially port or support which means we can finally get a somewhat decent pool of games available on the Mac platform. It’ll never be on par with or rival the PC but as an X Box Series X owner hopefully a nice, fast Mac Studio will have a good enough GPU with enough support from game developers to make enough games playable to at least be a somewhat respectable gaming platform when combined with a newer gaming console. I’d like to back get into gaming more. I did a ton of it in the late 90’s / early 2000’s when I was in high school then finally got what was then high speed Internet in college but once I graduated back in 2005 and computing became my day job instead of a hobby I lost interest in it and in gaming as well.
The 15” MacBook Air would be right up my alley but why buy now when an M3 version will likely be here in the next year? I might as well hold off until that next iteration.
Hopefully the Apple Game Developer Toolkit will be embraced enough by developers to allow the Mac gaming enthusiast community to get games running that developers don’t want to officially port or support which means we can finally get a somewhat decent pool of games available on the Mac platform. It’ll never be on par with or rival the PC but as an X Box Series X owner hopefully a nice, fast Mac Studio will have a good enough GPU with enough support from game developers to make enough games playable to at least be a somewhat respectable gaming platform when combined with a newer gaming console. I’d like to back get into gaming more. I did a ton of it in the late 90’s / early 2000’s when I was in high school then finally got what was then high speed Internet in college but once I graduated back in 2005 and computing became my day job instead of a hobby I lost interest in it and in gaming as well.
What they are saying is that the 256GB component costs Apple very little so the $1299 base model should have come with 8/512.