Going thrift shopping to the flea market that’s organized every Sunday morning in a nearby town, I had the surprise to encounter an 11" Macbook Air. The seller told me from the start that its battery was dead (which was expected at this point) and I went to check its specs. I honestly hoped for the i7 with 8GB of RAM, but I decided I would take it if it was an i-CPU, and not a Core 2 Duo, as that would put it pretty much on the same performance spot as my 2006 Macbooks. So when I saw that it was the Mid-2011 model, sporting a 1.6 GHz Core i5 (I5-2467M) and 4GB of RAM, I decided I wanted it. I haggled from 60 to 50 euro knowing that the battery would set me off another 50, but also knowing that I’ll end up with a fun and nimble little machine, perfect to write on the road, to browse stuff and to chat. So all in all, it’s a great little Macbook.

Compared to the previous Macbook Airs, this one brings backlit keyboard and also Thunderbolt 2. Lucky I still have a ton of adapters and dongles that work with my 2013 Macbook Pro, so I can easily hook this up to an external monitor or projector, or add a very fast external HDD, since the USB is only 2.0 and might not be fast enough for various tasks.

The battery replacement process is a very simple one, requiring you to remove the 10 screws on the back plate and then another 5 screws that hold the battery to the topcase. You can easily do this yourself, using the screwdrivers that come with the battery (one is a P5 pentalobe, the other one is a T5 Torx). If you want to do this yourself, check out a simple iFixit guide.

The first battery I ordered wasn’t good, as I ordered the incorrect part number (A1375 instead of A1406). The shape of the battery is identical, but the connector is just a few centimeters to the side, for the previous models, and it won’t fit. This is dumb from Apple’s part, because both my laptop and the one before have the same model number (A1370), but their insides are different.

Luckily, the guys from celo.ro, where I got the battery from were kind enough to refund me the money for the wrong battery once I sent it back and I was able to purchase another one, now a good model number. As it arrived today, I installed it and everything seems to be working just fine.

Later edit: I’ve left the laptop playing some 1080p content on youtube while on battery and while it does drops frames every now and then, it’s very watchable. Dropping the quality to 720p (keep in mind it has a screen resolution of 1366x768) makes it run perfectly smooth in fullscreen, as long as you don’t fiddle too much with the player.
Another later edit: Finally the laptop’s battery called it quits after 2 hours and 45 minutes of continuous 720p playback with the brightness at maximum (not 40% how most tests run it), in a well lit room (so the sensor didn’t dim that out). I’ve also adjusted the power settings not to dim the display while on battery, and also moved the sliders for energy saving to the least efficient end. Getting close to 3 hours of battery life of playing video is more than great and this will be a nice computer to use around the house.

Browsing the “modern” web is not very snappy, but reading the things I have in my RSS reader is a breeze and is a good multimedia machine. The screen is really nice and pretty bright and the small speakers while they won’t make your eardrums bleed, are more than enough for casual music and movie consumption.

More info about this laptop on Everymac.

Additionally, at the bottom of the page you can find a screenshot of the Macbook Air page on Apple.com in 2011, taken from here