M1 MacBook Air Teardown: What Happens When You Open Pro and Air Equipped with the Latest Processor?

Urian B., Tech Times 22 November 2020, 08:11 am

For those wondering if the new M1 MacBook Pro or the M1 MacBook Air is worth the hype and what exactly happens when one cracks these babies open, don't worry, iFixit has done it for those curious souls. iFixit has done an official teardown of the two models and also the 2-poort 13-inch MacBook Pro.

The findings were somehow both surprising but also somewhat expected. It was stated by an article by Arstechnica, what was found underneath the MacBook teardowns were somewhat the same and that almost nothing has actually been changed except for the given M1 chip.

M1 chip vs intel

The biggest change, however, is definitely the fan's omission within the MacBook Air. iFixit stated that the given Intel MacBook Air's own history of overheating in a few cases, it definitely speaks volumes regarding the M1's efficiency that as of the moment it seems like Air is pretty decent even without the fan as of the moment. There's also a missing T2 chip which has previously noted in a Mac mini review had also been replaced completely by the new M1 in all of the current Macs.

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro is said to be very similar to its previous predecessor. The previous T2 chip is also gone, but the new laptop still retains the very same cooling system and fan, with no difference at all. The reviews of the new 13-inch MacBook Pro still claim that the fan does not actually spin up as much as it used to, but the M1 MacBook Air teardown by iFixit concludes that this is because of the shift from Intel to the new M1 chips, not because of the cooling system improvements. The fans both on the M1 Pro and Intel are still interchangeable.

M1 MacBook review comparison

What is still not interchangeable are the majority of parts in the Pro and the Air. iFixit laments that the very similar silicon between both machines could have brought an opportunity to make new repairs easier by making the possibility of using space parts from one in order to fix the other feasible, but that does not seem to be the case.

In general, the efficiency gains and performance gains of the new M1 chip over the previous models are now counterballanced by the sheer fact that the new user-serviceability and the repairability are still not moving in a much more open direction. This is because the unified memory architecture of the new M1 suggests that Apple is still not planning to make the RAM upgradable or even replaceable at any time soon.

M1 chip Mac

iFixit still has not given the laptops an estimated repairability score just yet. The two notes however suggest that these scores might not be an improvement to those that were given to the models that came before which also did not have upgradeable RAM.