M4 MacBook Air Teardown: Painful DIY Repairs But A Surprising Bright Spot

Apple M4 MacBook Air with the chassis cover removed.
It’s fair to say that Apple’s products are not known for being super-friendly to DIY (do-it-yourself) repairs, though not without the occasional surprise, such as the iPhone 16 that scored 7/10 by the folks at iFixIt. What about Apple’s newly minted M4 MacBook Air? A fresh teardown reveals it’s largely more of the same, though there is a “surprising bright spot.” More on that in a moment.
In case you missed it, last week Apple unveiled its latest-generation MacBook Air with its custom M4 silicon inside, with a $999 starting price. Like the previous generation variant, the baseline specs on the newest iteration features 16GB of LPDDR5 unified memory and 256GB of proprietary solid state drive (SSD) storage. So no big surprises there (though it would have been nice if Apple bumped the starting storage at 512GB).

The system’s DIY repair chops are also mostly the same, unfortunately. In its latest teardown, iFixIt says it’s “sad to report that the M4 MacBook Air didn’t get any real repairability.” Furthermore, the repair specialists note that the several of the “welcome improvements” introduced on the iPhone side haven’t been ported over to Apple’s MacBook family.

To start with, the chassis design is unchanged from the M2 MacBook Air that was introduced in 2022. That means getting inside is the same process—remove four bottom screws and a couple of retaining clips, and then pull the bottom cover off. It’s not complicated, though not as easy as some (not all) Windows-based laptops.

One of the main reasons why a user might be inclined to tear open their MacBook Air (or any laptop) is to remove and replace the lithium polymer battery pack. Fortunately, the process isn’t daunting. Removing the bottom panel yields immediate access to the battery connector.

Unfortunately, the M4 MacBook Air does not employ the same electrically releasing adhesive as found in newer iPhone models. Four strips of adhesive hold the battery in place, and Apple’s repair manual suggests pulling them in pairs, “which is easier said than done.” Should one of the strips break, you’ll have to bust out a bottle of isopropyl alcohol to loosen the adhesive. That said, Apple gets kudos for not using adhesive on the battery cable that runs under the logic board.

Tweezers tugging at a port in a disassembled MacBook Air.

As to the surprising bright spot, Apple earns brownie points for employing modular ports that are both easy to access and remove.

“One common failure point on laptops are their ports, mostly due to mechanical wear as cables get plugged and unplugged thousands of times. Thankfully, on the newer MacBook Airs, both the MagSafe and USB-C ports are the more accessible—and replaceable—component,” iFixIt notes.

Removing the display is complex and harder than it needs to be, though, and the keyboard and Touch ID components are buried. One the positive side, repair manuals are already available. Overall, the M4 MacBook Air teardown scored a middling 5/10 on iFixIt’s repairability scale.

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