iFixit teardown of M1 MacBooks gives us our first glimpse at the M1 up close

[OneMoreThing...]

• 
  
  
  The M1. The two black boxes on the side are the RAM. [credit: Samuel Axon ]
  

As expected, iFixit has done a teardown of two of Apple's three new M1-based Macs: the MacBook Air and the 2-port, 13-inch MacBook Pro. What they found is somehow both surprising and not: almost nothing has changed in the laptops apart from the inclusion of the M1 chip and directly related changes.

The biggest change is definitely the omission of a fan in the MacBook Air. iFixit notes that given the Intel MacBook Air's history of overheating in some cases, it speaks volumes about the efficiency of the M1 that so far it seems the Air gets on just fine without that fan now. Also missing: the T2 chip, which we noted in our Mac mini review has been replaced completely by the M1 in all these new Macs.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro is even more similar to its predecessor. The T2 chip is also gone, but the laptop retains the exact same fan and cooling system, with no differences whatsoever. Reviews of the 13-inch MacBook Pro claim that the fan doesn't spin up as often as it used to, but iFixit concludes here that that's because of the shift from an Intel chip to the M1, not because of an improved cooling system. The fans on the Intel and M1 Pro are interchangeable.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Click here to view the article...

 

[krs]

I was happy to read that the memory used is actually SK hynix LPDDR4X memory, not memory that is part of the Apple M1 controller.
So once16GB modules are available (if not already), these Macs should become available with up to 32GB of RAM.

 

[chscag]

Where did you get the idea that the memory modules are replaceable? Not from what I read:

Next to the shiny silver M1 chip on each board you’ll notice two small black rectangles. Those are the new “integrated” memory chips: 8 GB (2x 4 GB) of SK hynix LPDDR4X memory. Apple calls this UMA, or Unified Memory Architecture. If it looks familiar, it might be because you’ve seen one of our recent iPad teardowns. It’s no surprise that Apple copied some of its own homework here. By baking RAM into the M1 package, each part of M1 (CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, etc) can access the same memory pool without having to copy or cache the data in more than one place.

Notice the word "integrated".

 

[krs]

I never said the modules were replaceable - just that the memory is not part of the Apple M1 silicon which was the suggestion previously.
The memory modules are 8GB modules from SK hynix, so once SK hynix has 16GB modules with that footprint they can offer the Mac with 32GB of RAM.

PS: I just checked a bit more.
These modules were initially introduced in early 2017 and were means speifically for cellphones.
8GB was the maximum capacity required for that application, so it seems a 16GB version may not be on the books even though this is almost 4 years later.

SK Hynix Announces 8 GB LPDDR4X-4266 DRAM Packages

www.anandtech.com

 

[chscag]

Okay, it seemed from your post above that's what you were stating. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

It is strange that the M1 MacBook Air and Mac Mini machines are only available with 8 GB of memory. It appears only the MacBook Pro 13" model has an option to select 16 GB.