MacBook Air internals revealed in tear-down photos

The folks over at iFixIt are the first to issue an illustrated report after having completely torn-down their HDD-based MacBook Air. Some photos and notes from their efforts follow.

Of particular interest is iFixIt's claim that they'll soon be among the third-parties who plan to manufacture and sell replacement batteries for the Air. The firm's extensive tear-down can be seen here, highlights of which are available below.

Meanwhile, high-resolution shots of the front and back of the MacBook Air's petite logic-board are also available.

MacBook Air Tear-down Highlights

• A temperature sensor sits on an external board glued between the CPU and graphics chips.
• The hard drive sits beneath the USB, micro-DVI, and audio ribbon cables.
• The Air is the first Intel-based Mac to run on 45 watt Power adapter. THe MacBook uses a 60-watt and the MacBook Pro an 85-watt
• Earlier MacBook MagSafe power adapters work, but won't fit when the Air is placed on a flat surface.
• The Air is held together by approximately 88 screws.
• 19 screws require removal to reach the battery -- 10 to dislodge the bottom case and another 9 securing the battery to the chassis.
• The entire display assembly weighs only 465 g (slightly more than a pound), 34 percent less than the functionally-equivalent display assembly on the MacBook.
• The actual LED display panel is less than 3mm thick.
• A substantial engineering effort went into designing robust Wi-Fi antennas.
• The speaker board is located beneath the arrow keys on the keyboard.
• The Air's RF Module includes a Broadcom 802.11 chip with the markings BCM4321KFBG.
• The heat sink is made of very thin aluminum and looks totally different from anything we've seen in a Mac before.
• There are 16 Micron RAM chips (eight one-gigabit chips on each side of the logic board) for a total of 2 GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM.
• The graphics chip is an Intel North Bridge GS965.
• iFixIt also identified a Silicon Image SIL1392CNU HDMI video chip and Texas Instruments TPS51120 dual current mode synchronous step-down controller (power management).
• A Broadcom BCM5974 touch screen controller chip on the interconnect board is the same chip you'll find in the iPhone and iPod Touch.