After a lot of fruitless goofing around with all manner of heat and twisting, we're stumped as to how to proceed from here. Finally we get impatient and grab the hacksaw (and our ultrasonic cutter) and release the super beefy woofer.

Update: An intrepid MacRumors reader had more success here. We tried approximately the same thing with no results, but maybe we should have kept trying! If you must pull one of these apart, give this method a whirl.

If the magnet on this woofer looks big for a speaker this size, that's because it is. Deep, dramatic bass notes depend on a speaker's ability to move lots of air.

While that's traditionally done by increasing the cone's diameter, Apple instead increased the travel of the voice coil (to 20 mm p-p in this case), which in turn requires a bigger magnet. That way the speaker diameter stays small, but it can still move enough air to deliver quality bass notes.