Macworld

Our reviewer calls it the perfect gateway Mac. But if that’s not enough to make you like the surprisingly affordable MacBook Neo, the first teardown of the device has revealed another factor in its favor: repairability.

A new video from the Australian YouTube channel TECH RE-NU demonstrates what the presenter describes as a “speedrun disassembly” of the MacBook Neo, from unscrewing the bottom plate to removing the trackpad. Without appearing to rush in any way, the presenter achieves this in double-quick time, while praising the way that the Neo’s simple construction lends itself to disassembly and easy repair.

When the speakers are popped out, they comment on the lack of sticky tabs. The battery lifts out easily (once the 18 screws are removed), and there’s no sticky adhesive. The audio jack is “nice and modular.” And while there is “a little bit” of adhesive on the trackpad, the presenter says that’s not the end of the world. Overall it’s a highly positive evaluation.

“We’ve done this in less than 100 minutes,” they say, while a caption points out that it’s actually been six. “Which is absolutely amazing for an Apple laptop. I can’t say we’ve ever had a Mac that looks as repairable or as modular as this one.

“It’s just super straightforward, elegant design. Apple has kept the costs down, [it’s] got the simplicity up, and that’s just meant a really repairable, very easy-to-open laptop.”

As the presenter notes, Apple designers have not always been this kind to repairers.

Last year the iPhone 16e was criticised by iFixit for the “terrible design” of its USB-C port, although other elements were received more favorably. A few years earlier the same site gave the iPhone 15 Pro Max a repairability score of just 4 out of 10 and complained about the company’s “ongoing constriction of repair freedoms through its restrictive parts pairing system.” And that’s before we even get into the “excruciating gauntlet of hurdles” presented by Apple’s self-repair program.

The issue, generally, has been that Apple receives revenue if you get your devices repaired at an Apple Store or accredited partner, so the company is incentivised to gatekeep the process. On the other hand, public praise of a product’s repairability can only help sales, so perhaps the Neo will herald the start of a new Apple strategy in more way than one.