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What a difference three years make

Published

5 years ago

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Now that Apple’s new MacBook Air has hit the stores, repair specialists iFixit have immediately cracked it open to see what’s inside. 

And frankly, if you’ve seen some of the teardowns of recent MacBooks, you won’t see too many surprises here. The new Air is a tightly packed machine that requires lots of specialized tools and patience to open and repair. 

But if we compare apples to apples — that is, the new MacBook Air with the last version of MacBook Air, which launched in 2015 — the differences are substantial. Check them out below: The new Air is on the left. 

On the left, the 2018 MacBook Air. On the right, the 2015 MacBook Air.

On the left, the 2018 MacBook Air. On the right, the 2015 MacBook Air.

Image: ifixit/Mashable composite

The Air of yesteryear was practically all battery: It had a 54Wh cell, while the new one only has a 49.9Wh cell. Despite this fact, both Airs have the same (advertised) 12 hours of battery life — talk about improvements in energy management. 

The new Air also has a ton of new tech, including a better, larger trackpad as well as Apple’s T2 chip with a fingerprint scanner. 

On iFixit’s repairability scale, the 2018 Air scores just a hair worse than the 2015 Air: 3/10 vs. 4/10. As another reminder of how things have changed in three years, on the 2015 Air you could theoretically change/upgrade the flash-based storage; on the new model, that’s no longer possible.

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