No internal design changes found in preliminary 11" MacBook Air disassembly

Source: OWC

When Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller announced the newest iterations of the MacBook Air on Monday at WWDC, the first feature he noted was the thin-and-light's extended battery life.

According to Schiller, the 11-inch model will go from an advertised 5 hours of battery life to 9 hours, while the latest 13-inch version lasts up to 12 hours, up from 7 hours. It appears the energy savings can be fully attributed to the switch to Intel's power-sipping Haswell ULT CPU and corresponding OS tweaks.

From what can be gleaned by the superficial teardown, provided by Other World Computing, the 11-inch model has gone largely untouched, with a battery and component layout identical to last year's version.

The lack of change is to be expected as Apple's product page notes no change to the 35-watt-hour battery, which in the case of the 11-inch MacBook Air is a six-cell design. The recently announced 13-inch version has not yet been torn down, though its internals are likely similar to last year's model, which featured a four-cell layout thanks to the additional space allowed by a larger chassis.

Also seen in the images is the new solid state drive Apple is using, which features a PCIe controller for faster transfer speeds.

A report earlier on Tuesday noted that Intel's Haswell processor provides the most gains in terms of battery life, while the PCIe flash memory solution brings major improvements in speed.