Ultimate 11-Inch MacBook Air Upgrade 

Somebody now has the ultimate 11inch early 2015 Macbook Air. Love your work Collin!

It's very satisfying to see it maxed out like that even if it isn't a practical proposition. Nice work!

My beloved 11 inch MBA is a special machine. I understand your client 100%. I was extremely sad when I tried to use it again at work a few weeks ago and saw it struggle with Microsoft teams, which is now a necessity in the office. I used my 11 inch MBA for work all the way until the pandemic hit and it was perfect. Tiny, yet extremely capable. Purchased 8 years ago, it still looks futuristic. I wish I can afford the upgrade your client did to have it working a few more years.

thanks to the guy who ordered it, probably so that everyone can see this piece of art!

Amazing work Colin. Somehow these projects and upgrades that "aren't worth it" are always my favorite. I think the GPU upgrade will make a significant difference to be honest, you should've run heaven or some other GPU benchmark. Sure, they're both weak by modern standards but it's still an improvement. Keep these upgrades coming haha, maybe upgrade a GPU next on one of the 15" machines would love to see something like that

I Love maxing out old computers. It provides the experience cheaply(albeit late) that it would've been when it was new and without the boatload of money(usually).

It's easy to make the i7 worth, just use Voltageshift to undervolt, and let it shine.

For the owner it is most likely all about making his MacBook Air rare and unique. The performance upgrade is not huge but it is noticeable however probably not worth all the work and cost to do this upgrade but amazing work to see this done nevertheless! I would pay Collin to have my 2015 11 inch air upgraded like this . . . just sayin'

I watched the video ‘til the end when I realized you are THE dosdude1. All I want to say thank you for making my 2007 iMac usable again. I changed the CPU just as you recommended on your website, I installed 5 GB RAM and using your Catalina patcher I installed a relatively new Mac OS. I use that computer everyday for browsing, listening to music and other various light tasks. Thank you for making my Computer not-ewaste! Do you have any plans making a Big Sur or Monterey patcher, even if it won’t be compatible with my iMac?

The ultimate carry around laptop

Hey man, that's stencil you have is really.. baller

Very fun little upgrade, great to see your process and in-depth explanation on this. Maybe the upgrade itself isn’t entirely practical, but seeing it done and explained so well is more than worth the price of admission. Thanks for sharing!

I have owned one of those, 4gig of ram and 128gig of flash. That 1366x768 display was why I upgraded for a newer air, but I really envy the owner of this ultimate 11inch MBA! The screen of this gen of MBAs was not good for sure but as I recall if you search online for a specific color profile for the display you can get a much better color representation out of that old-ass TN panel. The 4 gig ram was surprisingly capable and the overall performance was never an issue for me. I wish Apple would make smaller macs again sometime - not likely due to their current product strategy with iPads. Fun fact: Apple didn't stop the production of 11inch Airs until late 2017, and the later produced ones have a slightly better ssd.

Imagine this little 11" unit with an M1 chip, what a dream.

The geekbench shows a 26+ % improvement, which may not be worth the effort, but is a reasonably significant improvement in performance for many jobs.

I'm very impressed with your skill

This is awesome. I love the 11" machines because they are perfect as a work machine that is tiny so you can chuck it in your bag and have it on you at all times. For everything else I use my 16" Pro, but I love my 11" Air. How much would the RAM upgrade cost to do?

This guy is half-god for me. For so many years. Cheers!

Good to see this is all stuff that I can do at home on my dining table!

This is insane... I loved it. Thank you for posting it... great work.

Nice view of the hands in front of the camera

Great job! What a lovely 11 inch MBA!

Would have liked to see how much of a difference there was between graphic chips, because that’s where I feel there might be a bigger jump. I mean, sure, no miracles, but I would expect a decent jump from the HD graphics to Iris graphics.

Genius at work.

Awesome job and a slap in Apple's face. Very well done!

you decked that SOB out of hell.

Imagine taking this into apple and them being super confused at the hardware configuration lol Also that is going to be the hardest working MBA heatsink ever

I love that you can hot rod an A1465 Collin

That's really SOMETHING!! 👍

Watched the video and then saw that it was made by the legendary patcher himself! Love the youtube content.

Love these videos man. Keep it up!

Dude, what?! You are nuts!!!

your work is inspiring !

pleas add a thermal pad to help processor dissipate heat not just by heat pipe...

Crazy that Apple never offered a 16gb option on the Air given that it was clearly supported and ready to go. Usually they love to charge us a stupid amount of money for extra Ram. Awesome work on this dude, I'm amazed!

I only wish I could be this BADASS!

Totally amazing! 😍 I guess difference is big enough to make this machine pretty usable and still in 11" size 🤩

After recently hunting down a i7 8gb model I'm super envious :) great workmanship.

When ever he says balls I hear the vine boom sound in my head.

You're a god amongst peasants. That was my favourite MacBook of all time. I quickly became attached to this machine over a quick trip to Mexico when my 15" MacBook Pro failed on me and was in for repairs. I ended up not returning it and using it as my primary machine for years. It's still running as the wife's laptop. Only now we're upgrading her to a M2 MacBook Air and only because she's going back to work after having kids and needs a better webcam/microphone/etc.

Great nerdy video. I love it. Since I just upgraded my 11 inch to Sonoma using the Open Core Legacy Patcher I would have loved to see some Intel Power Gadget data what frequencies the i7 really runs under stress. The little original 1.6 can stay under full load at 2.5 - 2.6Ghz out of 2.7 top speed. Also differences in wattages CPU and package would have been interesting and if the 11inch has enough headroom for the additional heat.

this is fucking hilarious, seeing that much power in an 11 inch body

lol, i survived my CS studies with a crappy 2013 i5 mba with 4 gigs of ram this year, i'd have killed for that macbook, i love these 11" models

I wonder if it's possible to put an M1 board inside this little 11inch. I can't think of a better way to give the 11in macbook air the best performance and battery to that little thing but one can dream, right?

I would actully be intrested in this type of upgrade for my 13 inch macbook air

Is it possible to upgrade the screen somehow? Put something like, less borders and higher resolution?

im actually having this done soon! super excited

watching a "good" mac upgraded on windows pc is priceless.

Perfect Work! Thats great, the Person has an Ultimate Air now :D

Amazing! I subscribed. I didn't see how you actually changed the resistors on the board, hopefully I can find that technical detail in your other videos

The CPU in the MacBook Pro had a TDP of 28W, while the CPU in the MacBook Air had a TDP of 15W. That's nearly twice as much. The 28W chip already boils in the MacBook Pro. It'll thermal throttle like crazy in the MacBook Air. I would've liked to see a longer performance test, like Cinebench.

I really liked seeing this video. You are really Awesome. I wish I knew all the stuff you know to do those things here at my Apt to my old laptops, and upgrade them. Thanks for the Amazing Videos.

So glad I found your channel. You do the coolest shit.

Bro you are a wizard! Crazy impressive!

You rock man... Great job. God bless you.

On it’s own, the 11 inch MacBook Air never stood a chance next to the 13 in Air because the fully loaded 11 was nowhere near as powerful as the fully loaded 13 inch air.

Doubles as a hot plate so you can cook your instant ramen noodles while you pay off the fancy rework station. :D

A VERY SATISFYING UPGRADE!!!

This is amazing work Colin!

Very good job. I can solder but this is a different league.

A bit late now, but would be pretty cool to see geekbench and cinebench before/after with the temperatures during the runs from intel power gadget or similar. Then a followup video trying to deal with keeping the thermals somewhat under control, probably another project not worth doing but that's exactly what we want to see lol.

Not practical at all but I always have my eyes open for a cheap 2015 11" air. It's the perfect little travel laptop.

You are the Apple Genius

sera que nao tem ninguem aqui no brasil que faça isso? ajude ai galera, a comunidade brasileira precisa saber disso

I need someone to do this to my Broadwell Chromebook... replace that Celeron with a donor board i5 or something.

For the 8th gen intel cpus they did make quad core processors like like i7 8550u so intel did make quad core u series processors but they probably won’t work in that MacBook Air. Btw I like your videos

Fantastic! I’ve heard of re-balling BGA stuff but never watched it. I assume you work as an electronic engineer? Anyway, great video and well done sir! Subscribed 👍🍻

It's funny these geekbunch scores are pretty much in line with the Steam Deck

22:48 “drag on the dump we just took” 😂 oh boy…

Remarkable work by a highly talented master technician! As noted numerous times, all that work still result in a underpowered machine by 2022 standards. Mac lovers are kinda like a cult. (Maybe not even kinda, but actually. No offense intended ... (I run a PC, own an Iphone too 🤯).

Since i have work machine shop, mostly computers drive one i mostly work with pc, but for the mac i have they are personal machine only. they're not one in the shop that are mac compatible. still the only machine i am nearly never far away from, is my little mac air. a bit like some people with their phones, i do everything that is not work related with its, even watching this video and answer now in 2023. i update the SSD every two years in average, BootCamp to Tiny windows11 on a 1 tetra partitions and 1 tetra for mac lately,..an upgrade to i7 with Iris video, gosh dreamy idea..

I think the Jump in performance from 4GB of ram to 8GB of ram is a lot more noticeable than 8GB to 16GB.

I love this kind of video. Its not about how big of an upgrade. Someone loves that machine and wants it to be as good as it ever could have been. Bravo

Amazing work!

Almost 200 score jump in geekbench 5 single core test at this level of a score is a lot more significant than you said dosdude1! That literally differentiates gargabe from usable.

Scratching minor grooves around 2 or more corners of the chip using a thin needle prior to removing the chip helps a lot with aligning the new chip later on. :-) Just in case... These work as a placeholder, so you can always see where the chip was despite Apple not wanting you to. :-)

I always enjoy your videos.

This is spectacular handy work! I would love to buy one from you

Awesome video! But since you do such cool and technical stuff you should really upgrade the video quality

Imagine an 11-inch MacBook Air with the new updated design of the 2022 one and M2 inside!

Nice work!

Whoa!!!!! Great work.

Hey dude, I'm new to soldering in general. I was wondering if you had any tips or advice on newbies when it comes to electronic soldering or if you have any videos on the subject.

Why not just fix the donor board and put it on the macbook? Is it beyond repair?

This so awesome!

So user will be working inside a refrigerator.

OMG! This is just WOW level work...

You removed it with ease 😳

I have 11" 2013, i7 8GB 512GB. its battery is dead. Planning to replace battery with apple. But hope there is oem lcd screen to make resolution better.

That is pretty damn cool bud! I’ve never seen that before..

15w TDP vs 28w TDP lol that tiny macbook is going to be baking itself

According to transcript, you said "go ahead" only 53 times. Certainly seems a lot more.

I loved the 11”

Wait so you have to buy a whole board in order to upgrade is it even worth it

How can I contact you? Would like the 16GB update please

What I do for alignment before I remove the chip I use an exacto knife or something and draw out a corner of the chip on the ground layer of the pcb. This makes it so much easier to align

when people mod bios images, how do they know what and where to make change? I'm struggling to understand. I fried the middle pin in my dell n4030 charging port, so it's now unable to detect charger. cpu frequency stuck at 920mhz. because of that, now i have to add "cpu.ignore_ppc=1" to my linux kernel commandline. but I want to just disable the protection in the bios so everytime I boot a new experiment image on it i dont need the cpu.ignore_ppc=1 kernel commandline. can it be done?

Another great job. People ask for weird things sometimes but if they're willing to pay then what's the harm, right? What happened to your website? I tried to grab one of your patchers the other day and it keeps giving me a "too many redirects" error.

this amazing... i have macbook air just 4Giga Ram... this upgrade 16Giga Ram, very good ... how can i buy this macbk

Love the work!!!!