I bought my Macbook Air in Feb 2008 and for the last 11 months I’ve always been frustrated with the restrictive screen angle. It didn’t seem to go much past vertical (roughly 120°) so there were certain situations when I had it on my lap where I could not get the screen back far enough to view comfortably.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) my Macbook Air hinge broke/snapped the other day and this has resulted in the screen folding almost completely flat (roughly 160°).

There were no suspicious “circumstances” when the hinge broke, it had been sat on my desk from the previous day with the lid shut and I simply opened the lid whilst the MBA was on my desk and when the screen reached the usual point of resistance (roughly 120°) there was a momentary feel of resistance followed by a snapping/popping sound and the screen then went completely flat.

The screen was still working perfectly normally, no loss in general resistance of the hinge, the backlight was functioning ok, the picture was perfect and there were no nasty noises when opening and closing the screen.

The hinges appeared to be in tact when inspected just above the keyboard so I closed the lid and lifted it up to inspect the underside of the hinges. It was then that I noticed two tiny (and I mean tiny) specs of metal/plastic sitting on my desk roughly where the hinge was. On inspection they appear to be some kind of light weight alloy metal and look like they have sheared off at one end.

I kept hold of them both and tried to get some photos of them with my digital camera but they were too small too get a decent macro focus on, so instead I resorted to my Veho USB Microscope (handy Christmas present) to take some photos and have included a pencil tip, pin tip and ruler for scale purposes just so you can get an idea of just how small these pieces are. [see the gallery at the end of the post for all the photos]

I’m guessing that these two small parts were integrated into the hinge as “stops” to prevent the screen from opening too far. If that is the case then making them just over 1mm wide seems a little daft to me and I’m not surprised they have snapped.

I don’t really mind too much that the screen now opens to around 160° but I’m taking it in for repair this week just incase the excessive opening angle is causing any ribbon cables or similar connecting the screen to the motherboard to rub and wear through. There do appear to be numerous cases of this mentioned across the web, many seem to just have the screen open flat like me but a few others have cracked hinges and completely broken hinges.

I shall update once I’ve heard back from Apple Service.

UPDATE (4th Feb 2009):  I’ve now picked my MBA back up from repair and I’ve got a brand new lcd screen, surround, lid and hinge, basically the upper half has been completely replaced and from what I’ve researched that always seems to be the case, replacing the whole screen assembly rather than just the hinges. I have noticed that the new screen seems to suffer from the dreaded horizontal grey lines syndrome I’ve been reading about, I guess it’s a screen from the new Rev-B models, it’s certainly not as crisp as my old screen but I’m going to spend some time with it first before I decide if I’ll complain about it. Also, because of a problem with the date and time being lost every time the battery ran low I’ve also got a brand new battery, which was nice.

Your computer’s clock is set to a date before March 24th, 2001. This may cause some applications to behave erratically. Please use the Date & Time preference panel to set the clock manually. For more information, choose Mac Help from the Help menu.

Clicking on the clock in the top right corner of the screen does indeed show that the date and time is set to January 1st 2001. It normally shows midnight but it had been on charge for about 5 hours hence it’s showing 5:13am.

Almost all computers, both desktop and portables, have a small secondary battery on the motherboard (CMOS battery) which is used to keep the computer’s internal clock ticking when disconnected from the mains power supply or a notebook battery runs completely flat. It would appear that my Mac Book Air’s CMOS battery is defective and as such when the main battery is completely drained the onboard clock has no backup power source and loses the date and time.

Other than the annoying warning message it isn’t really too much of an problem for me though, I have had a few problems in the past joining my Windows domain at work as the domain server was reporting the MB Air had an illegal time stamp and a few outgoing emails have somehow been stamped with the wrong date/time although I thought they should have been stamped with my ISP’s SMTP server date/time?

QUICK FIX:

Simply going into System Preferences

Date & Time

and then unticking and reticking the set date and time automatically check box

updates the internal clock with the correct details (as long as you are connected to a network).

I’m not sure how often OS X polls the NNTP servers for the time but I’m sure if I left it alone with the wrong date/time it would probably self-correct within half an hour or so of being connected to a network. I might run little snitch and see if I can see how often it’s pinging the time.euro.apple.com server.

I have phoned Apple customer support and they have said this is obviously not normal behaviour, the onboard CMOS battery should be retaining the date/time for several weeks if the main battery is complete drained and the CMOS battery should recharge itself whenever the MB Air is connected to a power supply. It’s still under warranty for a few more weeks so I just need to take it in for repair but I’ve just not got around to it yet.

UPDATE 4th February 2009: I’ve just received my Macbook Air back from repair, along with a new screen/display unit it’s also had a completely brand new main battery. I called and spoke with the technician carrying out the repair and quizzed him about the faulty cmos battery and he informed me that most of the recent Macbook range including the Pro’s and the Air have phased out motherboard/cmos/clock batteries in favour of a capacitor based system in the MBA and small capacitor/onboard rechargeable battery in the others.. He said that even when your laptop battery doesn’t have enough power remaining to keep the disk spinning and screen on, there’s plenty left to power a simple onboard clock. As such the MBA just has a small capacitor to power the clock if the main battery is left so long that it runs down completely. In my case, however, they ran tests on the battery and it was draining too quickly when the was only a few % left and was showing as faulty. For this reason they were authorised to replace the entire main battery and they have run some tests (not sure what tests) to confirm the problem is resolved. I’m very happy, I’ve looked at the stats on the new battery and it most certainly is new, showing at the time as only have 2 “cycles” (full charges) under it’s belt and 99% health.

There are two model/spec options for the newer Macbook Air:

So it’s an extra £500 to upgrade the processor from 1.6GHz to 1.86GHz and 120GB SATA drive to 128GB SSD drive. However, if you click to configure the cheaper £1,299 machine and take it to the same spec as the £1,799 machine it actually works out CHEAPER!

You can see from the screen shot above that to upgrade from the 1.6GhHz to the 1.86GHz costs an additional £140. To upgrade from the 120GB SATA to the 128GB SSD costs an additional £350. So when you add them both (£140+£350) you pay an extra £490 which is £10 cheaper than buying the pre-configured machine with exactly the same specifiation.

Starting with the cheaper model and upgrading the processor and hard drive takes you from £1,299 to £1,789:

But many people assume that a pre-configured bundle must be cheaper, otherwise what’s the point in having it as an alternative option, but it looks like you are paying Apple £10 to click the upgrade buttons for you because it costs £10 more:

This only seems to apply to the UK version of the Apple online store, I just checked on the US online store 

which shows the model with the faster processor and SSD as $700 more than the base model. If you configure the cheaper version to the same spec as the more expensive version:

You end up paying $200 for the processor upgrade and $500 for the upgrade to SSD so a total of $700, the same as the higher spec pre-configured model.

After 9 days with my Macbook Air I’ve returned to the shop to ask for a replacement.

I noticed a few dark pencil thin marks appearing on the trackpad button and just wiped them away with my thumb. But they kept reappearing in the same place and getting more and more visible and also creeping onto the palm rest area too.

The marks are being caused by the top edge of the screen surround / bezel scratching the lower trackpad and palm rest areas when the case is closed and there appears to be a noticeable mark appearing on the edge of the bezel too.

I have also noticed that my trackpad button isn’t level in the case, the left edge sits lower than the right edge and consequently the right edge is getting more damage from the screen than the left.

My local Apple reseller have asked me to return the unit with box and all the bits on Monday when the area manager is around, I hope for a complete replacement considering the machine is 9 days old today.

I’ve had a quick search on the web and there doesn’t seem to be anybody else reporting this fault so hopefully its just a one off faulty unit and not a design fault across the Macbook Air range.

UPDATE (3rd March 2008):
I have just had my Macbook Air replaced without any questions. Becuase it was less than 2weeks old they were able to return it to Apple as DOA (Dead on Arrival) and issued me with a new MBA on the spot. I’ve not opened the new one yet but will be sure to report back here if the same thing happens with the replacement.