But things aren't so bad. Once the screws are out, you can just unplug it.

If you weren't counting, that's 19 screws to remove the battery. Replacing the battery is straightforward, but not something you'll be doing when your battery dies mid-flight.

It won't be long before we, along with the rest of the Mac market, will be selling replacement batteries for this machine.

The hard drive sits beneath the USB, micro-DVI, and audio ribbon cables.

Borrowing from the iPod design, the hard drive sports both foam padding and rubber bumpers. For those of us too stingy to spring for the shock-resistant SSD, hopefully this will give the hard drive a little extra protection.

With the cables unplugged, you can lift the hard drive out of its frame.

A hard drive swap is definitely possible, but it's no longer a trivial procedure like in the MacBook.

The MacBook Air comes standard with an 80 GB 4200 RPM Parallel ATA hard disk drive.

Just like the 80 GB iPod Classic, the hard drive is 1.8" wide and 5mm tall. Unfortunately, 80 GB is the largest drive in this form factor currently available. If you're a data pack rat, the Air probably isn't for you.

The speaker board is located beneath the arrow keys on the keyboard.

It outputs to both the 20mm speaker and the 3.5mm audio jack hidden in the drop down bay.

We found a Realtek ALC885 audio codec chip on the back of the board along with a TI TPS 62110.

The power interface connects the MagSafe power adapter to the motherboard.

The MagSafe connection is guided by several magnets:

• Four directly behind the MagSafe port.
• And two on either side.

The RF module, in all its blue glory. We spliced together two photos, so this image shows the front and back of the PCB.

The Broadcom 802.11 chip had the markings BCM4321KFBG.

We removed the EMI shield covering the RF chips. We uncovered a Skyworks SKY652225-11 R8, a Broadcom BCM2G55KF86, a Broadcom BCM2046, and an SST 39VF200A. We also found eight of Anaren's 1mm square baluns interfaced between the Broadcom and Skyworks chips, presumably running at 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

And the backside had another chip marked with BCM94321COEX2.

The heat sink is made of very thin aluminum and looks totally different from anything we've seen in a Mac before.

The L-shaped aluminum bracket on the heat sink rests tightly against the lower case, providing thermal conductivity without making an electrical connection to the chassis. The inside of the lower case has a patch of non-conducting material to aid this thermal dissipation.