I did this with the 11”, which was one of the greatest sized laptops for travel IMO, just had to replace the explody looking battery!

I'm down to ~10m of battery life on my i7 11" - any pointers on battery replacement? Laptop worked great otherwwise (retired it last year due to battery life)

I tried eBay like 4 times. But they were all fake or defective. At least one of them was dead on arrival.

I finally bought one from iFixit.com. Far more expensive than eBay, but the battery actually worked great for about a year. Then about a month after the 1-year warranty expired, it degraded noticeably (maybe to 80%) with only about 100-200 charge cycles. Even iFixIt cannot source a battery as good as the original Apple.

Right now, it's at 65% capacity after 584 charge cycles, after 4.5 years of service. I will probably go back to iFixIt. At least I'll get one year of full capacity from them, instead of the fake or DOA ones from eBay.

I used iFixit. I haven’t been tracking battery life really, but after a couple of years it’s still going strong

iFixit had a kit for the Air. Not sure about other models.

This is what I want to do as well but the 8GB RAM version was CTO, eveywhere I look people are only selling the 4GB models

11" is a great size - especiall if one has to work on a plane occasionally (economy class - not your own jet).

Same, I have a 2013. It’s such a good size.

The last time I tried this in 2022, I encountered a bunch of rough edges. I tried Ubuntu or Mint on a MBA 11 (2013 or 2015 models). Maybe Linux has gotten better since then?

For example, the fan did not work out of the box. I had to install something called 'macfanctld'.

Sleep did not work, it would wake up as soon as it went to sleep. I had to install something called a 'suspend-fix.service' hack.

Brightness control was flaky. It would always wake up at the lowest brightness setting. Disabling auto-dimming caused it to wake up at the highest brightness.

I've got one of these but it can't handle google meet these days.