MacBook Air And Pro M1 Teardowns Reveal Apple Silicon Heart

The iFixit team has published a teardown of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models featuring Apple's M1 chip. The teardown shows what remains the same and what has been changed, the most notable, of course, being the new Apple Silicon heart powering the machines. The team notes, among other things, that the new MacBooks 'could hardly be any more similar to their predecessors.'

The new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with the M1 chip are now available to purchase. They represent Apple's budding transition away from Intel, one that comes with the promise of better performance and improved power efficiency. Little else about the new models have changed, however.

The iFixit team opened up both models and published comparison pictures in their newly published teardown. There are some differences between the M1 Air and Pro compared to the previous Intel models; the MacBook Air M1 has ditched the fan and uses aluminum to deal with the heat, for example, while the Pro M1's thermal design is described as 'very similar' to its Intel sibling.

The teardown found that the fan in the new MacBook Pro M1 is identical to the one found in the dual-port Intel version. Most interesting, of course, is the M1 chip itself, which sports the Apple logo, eight CPU cores, and integrated graphics. Next to the 'heart' of these machines are the integrated memory, dashing any fantasies you may have had about updating the memory yourself.

Ultimately, the new MacBooks mark the beginning of Apple's two-year transition to its own hardware. It's unclear how long it'll be before we see Macs arrive with configurations aimed at professionals in need of more memory and storage, however.