The MacBook Air: Thoroughly Reviewed

During Jobs’ keynote, Apple mentioned that the Core 2 Duo in the MacBook Air was 60% smaller than standard Core 2 Duo processors. A quick look at Intel’s mobile Core 2 Duo datasheets reveals that indeed both the micro-FCPGA and micro-FCBGA packaged Meroms measure 35mm x 35mm. Is it possible that Intel designed a completely new package just for Apple?

It turns out that the answer is a surprising: sort-of. At last year’s Fall IDF Intel talked about Montevina, the successor to Santa Rosa due out in the second half of 2008. Montevina would combine a new chipset (Cantiga) with mobile Penryn. In addition to Montevina Intel will also release Montevina SFF, a smaller package version of the platform that reduces overall chip footprint by around 60%.

Pay attention to the size of the CPU, it drops from 35mm x 35mm down to 22mm x 22mm - Penryn SFF is around 40% of the size of regular mobile Penryn, which happens to be the same size as Merom.

It looks like Intel created Merom SFF specifically for the MacBook Air, a product that wasn’t in Intel’s lineup or roadmap but one that Apple needed. Remember that the first chip that will look like this wasn’t scheduled to be out for another six months with Montevina SFF.

It’s not clear whether Intel will make this custom Merom available to other OEMs (we’d suspect they would if there was enough demand), but it’s a tremendous feat on Apple’s part. This isn’t the first time Intel has put together a one-off chip for Apple; if you’ll remember, the CPU in the Apple TV was a special Dothan that wasn’t a part of Intel’s standard lineup.

We’ll have a look at the MacBook Air as soon as they start shipping, if you’re ordering one now we’d recommend taking the SSD option if you can afford it. At $999 it’s pricey, but it should help keep heat down in the chassis and performance should be better than the pitiful 1.8” HDD in the system, which we suspect will end up being its weak point.

We also can’t help but think that a Penryn based MacBook Air would be far more desirable thanks to lower thermal output of Intel’s 45nm chips. If you are fine waiting, a MacBook Air in the second half of 2008 will give you slightly better performance, better battery life and should keep your lap a lot cooler.

Our MacBook Air just arrived and before even turning it on we had a few burning questions we had to answer. These questions of course required us to break out the screw driver and open up the poor little thing.

The MacBook Air is surprisingly easy to take apart, you simply have to remove 10 screws from the bottom of the notebook and just pull the base away. There's no prying, no heat gun and no special tools required. This was infinitely easier than taking apart the iPhone.

Gallery: Apple MacBook Air: Unboxed

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Gallery: Apple MacBook Air: Dissected

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

With the bottom off you'll see this:

The big black thing that takes up the majority of the real estate is the Air's battery, to remove it you simply unscrew it from the chassis:

With the battery out of the way the MacBook Air is much simpler on the inside. The upper left houses the hard drive and next to it is the motherboard. The little thing in the lower right is the wireless adapter.

We wanted to accomplish two things: get a closer look at the hard drive and have a look at the SFF CPU/chipset that we'd been so obsessed with a couple of weeks ago. Getting the battery out wasn't a problem, but replacing the hard drive proved to be a little more challenging.