So it turns out that the Mac­Book Air’s bat­tery is a single dis­crete block (albeit a very thin one) that runs across the bot­tom of much of the case, and it’s rel­at­ively easy for an end user to swap out. Some people are call­ing this good news, but to me it just means that there really is no reason bar cost for not mak­ing the thing user swap­pable in the first place. I guess it might have meant weak­en­ing the case, but I’m not con­vinced; this is Apple, after all — I’m sure they could have come up with a neat bat­tery removal mech­an­ism if they had the will (I’m think­ing a covered slot on one side of the device that you slide the bat­tery into — like a really big PCMCIA card). I guess they’re just exper­i­ment­ing to see if people are pre­pared to put up with it. Lets hope people don’t an Apple fix this in the next version.