iFixit has done its teardown of the iPad Air and has found a 32.9 Watt-Hour (WHr) battery — a battery slightly larger than what Apple has advertised as a 32.4 WHr battery. It’s a smaller, two-cell battery, compared to the fourth-gen iPad’s 43 WHr three-cell battery. iFixit also confirms that “the speakers have gone stereo” like the iPad mini — the fourth-gen iPad and its predecessors had a mono speaker.
Few other surprises are revealed in the teardown. iFixit gives the iPad Air a repairability score of 2 out of 10, meaning that it’s very hard to repair. Lots of adhesive is used to hold components in place, with iFixit noting, “This is the most difficult battery removal procedure we’ve seen in an iPad.”
