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Macs were never made to be messed with. Apple has softened its approach to aftermarket upgrades in recent years, a little, making it easy to switch out both the memory and hard drive in most MacBooks made in the past couple of years. But the MacBook Air is still a bit of an upgrader's island - you can't even bump up the Ram as …

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  1. Rob Crawford

    I don't wish to be pedantic but

    calling Torx screws non standard is a bit mistaken.

    Back in the 80s Compaq used them on almost, everything the Amiga RF shield used them

    Since then the car industry has fallen in love with them.

    Ok so they're not common in a domestic setting, but then neither are SSD drives

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    1. Annihilator
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      Go

      Whole hearted pedantry

      Never apologise for pedantry! You're 100% correct, and the reason they're used is touched on in the article - they're designed to not slip (unlike Phillips) in order to achieve consistent torque (where the name comes from?). Presumably one of the reasons the car industry loves them too.

      They're an ISO standard these days.

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      1. Andy 70
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        Go

        more pedantry of sorts.

        you mention in the artical, that "if you really need the speed, etc etc." if you needed speed, would you not have bought something else other than an air?

        still i applaud efforts made to encourage the seperation of fool, money, yadda yadda

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Headmaster

      More pedantry

      The Torx screws on the base of the Mac Air are 5-point compared with the usual 6-point which I have in my Uber-Mac User's toolkit. Wondered why my T5 didn't fit ...

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  2. Phil A.

    speed?

    If you're only concerned about speed, you wouldn't have an MBA in the first place! The machine is about portability and enough speed to get the job done, and I don't really see this being a useful upgrade for that demographic

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    1. Andy Christ
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      Um, the MacBook Air is a very speedy little beast, the 13 incher actually outpaces the similarly sized MacBook Pro with the standard HD.

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  3. Tom 79
    Thumb Down

    Fast

    Yes, my 13" Air compiles faster than my 2009 17" MacBook pro. Besides, the HD IO is the biggest bottleneck by far for most operations.

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  4. AdamWill

    heat

    is it at least worth considering that you somehow affected the cooling capabilities of the system in the course of opening it up, swapping out the drive, and closing it again? you could have blocked up a vent or something.

    it seems unlikely that one SSD would run so much hotter than another that it would significantly affect the overall temperature of the system.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Standard SSD

    So - my Air arrived today - it's my first Mac. How can I tell if I have a Samsung or a Toshiba unit? I haven't even unboxed it yet, and I've not used a Macintosh since 1990 so I have no idea how I can use the O/S to tell me what I've got.

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    1. Mark 65
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      System info under the Apple symbol, top left.

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    2. Snapper
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      Happy

      Easy

      Apple Menu > About This Mac > More Info and all the specs are laid out for you.

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    3. Angus Millar
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      Apple menu / About this Mac / More info / Hardware

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  6. OWC

    Clarifications to article from OWC

    Some inaccuracies or assumptions here that need to be addressed:

    1. the Connectivity spec....it's not mSATA 6Gb/s...we use a custom connector.

    2. the heat increase is related to freeing up the 6Gb/s bus so the processor can do more tasks faster. Now the drive is not the bottleneck and the machine can run as it was intended to.

    3. related to above then, one won't experience significantly lower battery runtime if the time to complete various tasks is reduced significantly. For most users running multiple tasks....the issue of time spent vs battery life used (compared to stock machine) is a wash....meaning no major difference in battery runtime from factory SSD vs ours. Does ours use more? Yes...but not to the detriment suggested.

    And at idle, the power use results are nearly the same.

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