The MacBook Air M4 was released last week, and with a $100 price cut on its predecessor, it’s an easy recommendation, even if it’s not an enormous upgrade. Early adopters who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with self-repairs will find iFixIt’s teardown of the laptop a mixed bag of good and bad news, however.
On one hand, it shares the modular design of its predecessor, and Apple produces guides and all the spare parts you need. On the other, some elements remain unupgradable, others are painfully hard to reach and — most damningly of all — Apple’s software locking still stands in the way of certain common fixes.
The Good
Starting with the positive, battery and port replacement is about as easy as it gets. Though the battery doesn’t use the electrically-releasing adhesive seen on the new iPhones, the adhesive strips come loose easily enough making for a quick like-for-like replacement with a spare.
The USB-C ports are also modular and easily removed, not soldered to the motherboard, which is a big win, considering the wear and tear involved in constantly plugging and unplugging cables.
Trackpad removal is also a “fairly easy, if tedious process”, involving flipping the laptop upside down, placing a piece of paper between it and the screen, and then removing ten screws.
The Bad
So far, so good, but all of these things need to be done before you can even think about a screen repair, and that’s a problem.
“This is actually one of the more common repairs on portable electronics, but in this device it’s buried pretty deep, making it a fairly unpleasant experience,” explains host Shahram Mokhtari in the video voiceover.
Once finally free, we get to the “second-most difficult component to reach” — the Touch ID button. “There is no way to remove this button without first disassembling the top half of the device,” Mokhtari explains.
The hardest bit? The keyboard. If you need to replace that, a full disassembly is required.
Once again, storage is soldered down and thus can’t be upgraded, but a bigger problem is on the software side when going alone on repairs.
The Ugly
On the accompanying iFixIt blog post, the company’s Director of Sustainability, Elizabeth Chamberlain writes about the issues the team ran into while subbing in working components from other identical systems.
“When we swapped logic boards between two identical M4 MacBook Airs, System Configuration gave us an error: the ambient light sensor wouldn’t calibrate, which disabled True Tone,” she writes. “The manual said our only path to remedying that error was to go through the Self Service Repair Store team, which of course, we hadn’t used to buy the part.”
These problems will occur both with salvaged working parts from other devices and third-party components, she writes. That’s not only hugely wasteful, ensuring that otherwise working parts are destined for the e-waste scrap heap, but also makes things unnecessarily expensive for the consumer by giving Apple a monopoly on part selling.
“Overall, the MacBook Air M4 has potential to score well for repairability, owing to its largely modular construction,” Mokhtari concludes in his outro. “But the soldered-down storage module, the unresolvable calibration issues with the screen, and the keyboard that’s buried under all the internals are all factors that will negatively impact the end user’s ability to repair the most common failure points this device will run into.”
All of this adds up to a middling provisional score of 5/10 for repairability. “At least this scores better than an iPad, even though that bar is on the floor,” Mokhtari adds.
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