MacBook Air M4

The specification you buy is the specification you keep

Memory and flash storage are soldered to the board. That is not an accident of miniaturisation; it is a purchase decision made for you six years before you will feel it. The machine you configure today is the machine you own until it dies.

The practical consequence is that you must overbuy on day one. A base configuration that is comfortable in year one will be tight in year four, and there is no upgrade path other than a new laptop. On the ThinkPad next to it in this category, the same money spent on two memory modules changes the machine's useful life by years.

Glue where screws would do

Independent teardowns score the Air line around 5 out of 10, and the reason is rarely the layout. It is the method of retention: batteries bonded to the chassis, display assemblies that need heat and patience, proprietary fasteners throughout.

The battery is the one that matters, because it is the repair every laptop eventually needs. Lithium chemistries degrade whether or not you use the machine, and a glued cell turns the most routine service in computing into a workshop job with a real risk of collateral damage.

Screen replacement is the other headline cost — on high-resolution panels the repair can approach half the price of the machine, which is the point at which owners stop repairing and start replacing.

Repair under the new European rules

As of 31 July 2026 the EU Right to Repair Directive applies across member states. It requires manufacturers to repair covered products at a reasonable price, gives consumers an extra year of legal guarantee when they choose repair over replacement, and prohibits software or contractual techniques that obstruct independent repair without an objective justification.

Apple already runs an independent repair provider programme in Europe and publishes manuals for its computers, so the practical effect here is less about access and more about the barriers that remain — parts pairing above all, where a genuine component still needs the manufacturer's software to be accepted by the device.

How hard that prohibition is enforced will be decided nationally over 2026 and 2027. The direction is clear even if the timetable is not.

The cheaper model is the more repairable one

There is a genuinely encouraging signal in Apple's newest entry-level laptop, which launched with screw-retained battery hardware, repair manuals published on day one, and acceptance of used genuine parts through the company's repair assistant. Independent teardowns scored it above the far more expensive MacBook Air.

Apple has not said publicly that European regulation drove the change, and it is presented here as reporting rather than confirmed strategy. But the timing is not subtle: the design appeared as the spare-parts obligations came into force, and the outcome is a cheaper machine that is easier to open than its premium sibling.

That is the clearest evidence yet that repairability is a design choice, not a law of physics. It also means the correct advice on this page may expire. If a future Air adopts the same construction, the score here should be rewritten — and if it does not, the gap between the two product lines becomes the story.