True to its branding, the new M2 MacBook Air is thin, even thinner than the M1 MacBook Air. The new flat and wedge-less design language has not only reduced its thickness but has allowed Apple to equip it with more ports: two Thunderbolt/ USB 4 ports, a headphone jack, and MagSafe charging.
And like the Intel-based MacBook Air models, the Apple Silicon MacBook Air models are fanless. They do not have an active or passive cooling system.
Repair expert at iFixit did a thorough teardown of the M2 MacBook Air’s base model to reveal its internal design, components, and chips. More importantly, still lacks a cooling system but stores a surprising chip, an accelerometer.
This summer’s M2 MacBook Air is looking like a Donna Summer—as in hot hot hot. We didn’t expect to find active cooling in this base model M2 Air, but we didn’t find much of a passive cooling system either—not even a heat spreader?
The internal design of the M2 MacBook Air is as beautiful as the exterior
It only took four screws to take off the lower case which revealed the neat internal layout of the components, covered with a black protective shield and lots of screws and brackets.
The battery is right under the lower case and uses an iPhone-like tiny connector. However, it was not as easy to get to the Logic board, after removing multiple brackets and screws the engineer finally was able to free the clip-on shield which is used as a protective cover of the Logic board.
The Logic board of the 2022 MacBook Air base model holds scolded M2 chip, 256 GB NAND flash memory chip, Thunderbolt 3 driver which is “seemingly” made by Apple “instead of the Intel chips”, a USI chip for WiFi and Bluetooth, an accelerometer surprisingly and empty space. The layout made the engineer question how the machine cool down.
The empty pad makes sense—it’s for the extra SSD chip we didn’t pay for—but, where’s the heat spreader? What’s with this big gap? How does this thing cool down? Sure it had a lot of thermal paste and graphite tape, and yeah the M2 is efficient, but this shield is super thin, so it’s not helping much—and the case is lighter than last year, so? Maybe the M2 Air is secretly an iPad … or maybe Apple is just letting it run hot.
Starting at $1199, the M2 MacBook Air base model has an 8-core CPU (4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores) and 8-core GPU. It features 256GB storage and 8GB memory.
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