Apple’s MacBook Neo turns out to be its most repairable lappy in 14 years

iFixit opens Apple’s budget system, discovers something missing from MacBooks: replaceable components

Apple's latest MacBook may be cheap, but it also comes with something modern MacBooks haven't offered in years: a fighting chance of being repaired.

In a teardown published late last week, iFixit said that the recently-launched MacBook Neo is the most repairable Apple laptop in roughly 14 years, a surprising shift for a company that has spent the past decade gluing, soldering, and otherwise discouraging anyone with a screwdriver from poking around inside its hardware.

The Neo, announced earlier this month as Apple's new entry-level MacBook starting at $599, is aimed squarely at students and budget buyers. It also marks a few unusual design decisions for Cupertino, as the laptop uses Apple's A18 Pro chip – the same silicon found in the iPhone 16 Pro – rather than the company's M-series Mac processors, and arrives in bright colors clearly meant to evoke the friendly plastic Macs of long ago.

Under the hood, however, iFixit's teardown team found several choices that technicians haven't seen in a MacBook for some time. Instead of glue and rivets holding major parts together, the Neo relies heavily on screws.

The battery alone is secured with 18 screws and can be lifted out without the usual adhesive wrestling match that plagues many recent Apple laptops.

The keyboard is technically replaceable too, though technicians will need patience: iFixit counted 41 screws that have to come out before the new one goes in.

Several components are also modular. Ports, speakers, and other small parts can be swapped individually rather than forcing repair shops to replace large assemblies, and Apple has published official repair documentation for the machine at launch.

All of that helped the MacBook Neo land a 6 out of 10 on iFixit's repairability scale – which might sound middling until you remember that many recent MacBooks struggled to break past four.

Still, the laptop is far from a repair utopia. Like most modern Macs, the Neo's RAM is soldered on, meaning buyers are stuck with the 8 GB it comes with. Storage is similarly fixed, and Apple still uses its trademark pentalobe screws on the case.

Even so, the teardown suggests Apple may be inching, albeit cautiously, toward designs that are at least somewhat friendlier to repair. Does this signal a genuine shift or simply reflect pressure from right-to-repair advocates and regulators? Hard to say at this point. ®