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12-inch MacBook teardown provides closer look at its tiny motherboard, terraced battery design

We saw teardowns of the 2015 MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro last month, but now a Feng.com user has provided us with the first teardown of the all-new 12-inch MacBook. Apple heavily touted the internal design of the laptop during its unveil last month and today’s teardown gives us a closer look at what exactly the company had to do in order to make the 12-inch MacBook as small as possible.

During its unveil of the laptop, Apple touted that the 12-inch MacBook features a motherboard that is 67 percent smaller than that of the MacBook Air. The ultra-small motherboard can be seen in the teardown images of the 12-inch MacBook. Apple also touted that it designed the batteries for the MacBook to be as space efficient as possible, and that is definitely apparent in these teardown images. Apple used a terraced battery design for the 12-inch MacBook, which allows the company to be incredibly space efficient with the batteries.

Finally, the new MacBook also features the same Force Touch technology that we saw on the 2015 Retina MacBook Pro. The Force Touch trackpad doesn’t actually push in like a normal trackpad, but rather provides haptic feedback to provide the same feeling as a normal trackpad.

A gallery of images from the 12-inch MacBook Air teardown can be seen below, with more available from the source.

(via LaptopUltra)

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Comments

  1. Greg - 9 years ago

    These pictures, although useful, remind me why I love iFixit.

  2. macmaniman - 9 years ago

    I guess you can’t call them unibody anymore

    • Mark Newfangled - 9 years ago

      So you don’t know what unibody means. It means the frame and body are a single piece. Like the last MacBook, there is no separate frame like in a plastic cased laptop.

  3. mpias3785 - 9 years ago

    There’s a lot to hate about the new MacBook; lack of ports, soldered in RAM and SSD, loss of MagSafe but just think of what this steaming pile of technology may portend.

    Look at the size of the motherboard and then think back a few years, remember the Motorola Atrix? A phone that you can plug into a laptop-like dock and have, well something you wouldn’t want, but a neat idea all the same.

    Now imagine an inch thick iPhone (imagine the battery life and or power) that plugs into a laptop dock and gives you a full Mac complete with ports, maybe more RAM, video card and other goodies. Think back to the DuoDock. We can dream.

Author

Avatar for Chance Miller Chance Miller

Chance is an editor for the entire 9to5 network and covers the latest Apple news for 9to5Mac.

Tips, questions, typos to chance@9to5mac.com