Hasta La Gadget!

Like a pack of hungry attack dogs on a piece of bloody flesh, Kyle Wiens and his iFixit cronies have gotten medieval on the new “unibody” MacBooks, ripping them apart to reveal the electronic tripe inside and spill it across their work-room slabs.

From the outside, the new plastic MacBooks look like white versions of their aluminum big brother. Aside from losing FireWire and separate audio-in ports, the white MacBook also lacks the SD card reader of the Pro models.

On the inside, there are some surprises. The lower case is actually aluminum, and has a rubber coating on the outside (it also loses the little rubber feet, saving you the bother of doing the same). The battery is held in with tri-wing screws, the driver for which not many people have lying around, and the hard drive, too, is harder to get at (the previous MacBooks had a slide-in design, and were arguably the easiest Mac drives to replace, ever).

But the big surprise is just how simple things are when the MacBook is fully disassembled. Some of this comes from combining previously separate parts (Bluetooth and Wi-Fi now share a board), and partly it is just a simpler design. Either way, it’s yet another Apple product that looks almost as good on the inside as the outside.

MacBook Polycarbonate Unibody Teardown [iFixit. Thanks again, Kyle!]

See Also:

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