The first look contains high resolution photos of the MacBook Air's internals, including Intel's custom low-footprint Core 2 Duo processor. This guide adds another installment to iFixit's revolutionary do-it-yourself laptop repair manuals, the Fixit Guide Series. Fixit Guides are available for Apple laptops, iPods, and the iPhone. All Guides are available free online at www.iFixit.com/Guide.
The Air's hard drive is an industry standard PATA 5mm 1.8" Samsung drive. The MacBook Air only has 5 mm of vertical space allocated for the hard drive, so it will not fit the 160 GB 8mm drive shipping in the iPod Classic.
Although Apple claims the battery is not user-serviceable, the first look shows that battery installation is surprisingly easy, requiring only a Phillips screwdriver. iFixit anticipates that the demand for user-replacement of MacBook Air batteries will be significant.
iFixit also discovered that Apple's new trackpad technology uses the same controller chip used in the in the iPhone and iPod Touch. There is a Broadcom BCM5974 touch controller chip on the trackpad interconnect board. This may give Apple more options when adding touch functionality via software updates, just as they have done with the iPhone."