The Tech Bench

Inside of a MacBook Air battery. The top casing has been removed to expose the interior.

The MacBook Air was the first of the current Mac laptop line to incorporate the “built-in” battery design. These newer generation batteries are wide, tall and very flat.

Like previous Mac laptop batteries, these batteries are made up of a a group of smaller packs. In this case, four separate battery packs are connected together.

These newer packs resemble large iPhone batteries whereas previous models looked more like standard “C” batteries.

The MacBook Air battery also incorporates temp sensors which provide not only battery temp, but are used to determine overall system temp as well.

So far these batteries have proven to be very reliable. The above battery was swapped after a liquid spill damaged the controller board.

Why show you the inside of a Mac’s battery? Why not!

This is a Lithium-ion battery from a 15″ PowerBook. It’s made up of smaller cells all connected to a small circuit board. The circuit board includes the button and LED lights to show remaining charge.

A temperature sensor can be found on top to help keep the battery from getting too hot. Overheating led to some accidents that caused other laptop batteries to explode. Pretty scary stuff.

It’s amazing that they allow things like this on a plane but not 4 oz of mouthwash?