MacBook Air M4: A Repair Win or a Locked-Down Mess?

Spring has sprung and new MacBook Airs are popping up on to our teardown table. This year's refresh brings Apple’s most capable M4 Silicon to the iconic laptop. That means a couple more cores here or there depending on the configuration you pick, and doubling the base model’s Unified Memory from 8GB to 16GB. The camera gets a resolution bump from 1080p to 4K and, rather surprisingly, both the 13 and 15 inch versions get a $100 price cut with the 13-inch coming in at $1000 pre-tax. What will we find inside the new MacBook Air? Let's find out!

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[ratshackmojo]

PC manufacturers need to take note of the USB C ports not being soldered to the motherboard for easy replacement.

[MXRU-pixb]

i'm not much of a mac fan but what i am a fan of is the insides. They always design the internals of their products like its art.

[luciofstars]

I'm shocked that the MacBook Air has more repairable USB-C ports than my ThinkPad. A surprise, but a pleasant one.

[JohnPMiller]

6:17 Is it upgradeable (but proprietary) storage? No. I'm guessing many of you came for this info.

[Alex-hvir]

Now remove parts pairing, develop an ultrafast modular storage and ram modules and you got a 10/10 device in every aspect

[williamsanborn]

If we disregard the parts pairing issues, this MacBook Air is surprisingly repairable! 😮

[MohseenLala]

honestly, the sticky tape holding down the battery is what pisses me off the most. the rest of the machine is just unscrewing stuff and popping connectors, which is fine by me.

[Satanist-zmrq]

Is the background music really necessary? It's loud enough and aggressive enough to be distracting.

[OriginalSniperLol]

Picked up the 13" Midnight 16/512 on 3/17/25. Loving this speedy, beautiful machine so much. Planning to keep this for several years. Great vid!

[marsmartian]

Deciding my purchase based on the tear down

[Luzgar]

Remember when you could pop out the keyboard of a laptop in 5 seconds with anything vaguely pointy ?

[westnylefx]

Wow I didnr realize how much of the device was the battery.

I do love my macbook air

[maravreloaded]

Apple needs to make their SSD removable like the ones in the Mini/Studio. That would make it perfect.

[Notmyfruit]

Apart from block and lego type disassembly, actually this is repairable for compariosn to old air type laptops.

[Ranjan]

Looks like this teardown is m4 air 16/256. And logic board shows 2 SSDs. Each must be 128 gb. However many youtubers and reviewers reported that write speed is slower in Blackmagic disk speed test compared to m3 air 16/256. Any idea why?

[TechOut]

So the battery can be replaced by itself without having to buy a whole top case assembly?

[binaryalchemy]

Love to see the iPhone repairability transferred over to mac.

[ugh-meh]

I was looking forward to seeing the heatsink on the SoC and seeing if it seemed better than last year. But you didn't do anything with the mainboard besides remove it.

[Genomerio]

Just a FYI, your audio levels are way to high for the dialog.

[xavarius_felk]

Im surprised by the fact macbook has more repairable ports than my work thinkpad, alienware laptop I take for travel and my home PC