The new MacBook Airs are locked down tight, with our good friends over at iFixIt describing it as perhaps Apple’s least user-serviceable notebook yet. How locked down is it? Even the RAM is soldered to the motherboard. In fact, once you actually break open the MacBook Air, about the only thing that is remotely user replaceable is actually the Toshiba SSD drives installed inside.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that companies are already hawking replacement SSDs for the MacBook Air. The company in question is Photofast, based in Taiwan, and they’re now promising imminent delivery of a 256GB SSD memory module which will double the maximum memory capacity of your Air.
Price and release dates are still unknown, unfortunately, but according to Photofast, the upgrade will be fast and stable, and will actually give your new Air a 30% performance boost in read or write speeds of Apple’s advertised 160MB/s speeds. Apple’s conservative in their estimates, so it’s probably not that big of a boost, but considering the SSD drive in the Air is mostly responsible for the slender notebook’s excellent performance (despite relatively puny processors), even a slight bump in SSD performance is likely to be noticeable.
