Removing the Display

Removing the display was relatively easy, but time-consuming. There were lots of screws and they had pentalobe and torx heads, but these are standard in any electronics screwdriver set — I have one of those.

I checked a couple of disassembly videos on YouTube to make sure I wasn’t going to encounter any plastic tabs which might break off, short tearable ribbon cables etc, and to find where the display connectors were. I’ve taken apart quite a few laptops, this wasn’t one of the worst.

Separating the lid from the base was tricky. Even when all fastenings were removed it was still stuck. I couldn’t tell if it was just tight tolerances on the hinges (hey, get the tolerances tight enough and metal sticks to metal… although I think even with Apple’s admittedly precise engineering this was probably normal stuckness rather than anything more mystical), or if there was a piece of the assembly in the way, something I’d missed.

I found a video suggesting to open the laptop to 90 degrees, then hang it off the edge of a table and give it a sharp whack to separate the lid from the base. They made it look easier than I found it to be, but eventually I got the lid off.

Keeping the lid

After looking into various cases and sleeves (if nothing else I wanted to be able to stop keys from getting pressed when the Macbook was put away and waking it up), I decided that I’d keep the lid. It is thin, light and tough, so why not continue using it to protect the computer? It was designed for the job.

Getting the glass panel out of the lid was a chore. Like most modern displays it was very thin and shatterable (pre-shattered in this case), and gripped tightly to the inside of the metal shell of the lid via some kind of adhesive or thin tape. I had to use heat and a scraper and it made a horrible and probably dangerous mess, thousands of specks of shattered material that looked pretty like toffee-apple but were actually cutty, inhalable glass.

I worked slowly, every minute or so I swept up the latest shards into a container so they wouldn’t get embedded in my hands/cornea/bronchioles. I did this gently so as not to disperse the bits all over the place with the flicking of the brush.

After a while I had the idea of sticking a patch of duct tape over each area of glass before I scraped it away. This worked well, preventing the pieces from scattering and making it easier to scrape the glass away from the metal shell of the lid.

• Macbook Air M1 lid, screen removed

With all the glass finally removed, there were a couple of areas which remained sticky and some unfinished sharp metal edges. To prevent it from getting hair stuck to it or from scratching the keyboard/touchpad I covered the entire inside surface of the lid with some clear adhesive plastic sheet.

The final effect is reminiscent of an overprotected sofa, but it’s all I had to-hand and it’ll do for now.