Apple’s MacBook Neo budget laptop has been an early hit. With supplies constrained in April, there’s been speculation about what will happen if Apple runs out of the A18 Pro processor (which was first introduced to power the iPhone 16 Pro).
In terms of longevity, the Neo might have an advantage over other portables: It’s Apple’s most repairable laptop in ages.
For several generations, the company’s laptops have been designed as sealed vaults that house a processor, memory, storage and other electronics. And when I say “sealed,” I mean it: Opening one up often involves using a heat gun to soften stretches of glue and adhesive strips.
That’s all great for creating a solid aluminum laptop that won’t split when you look at it sideways, but it is an ongoing source of frustration for non-Apple repair shops and individuals willing to violate their warranties to make minor changes instead of paying Apple to do the work.
With encouragement from the right-to-repair movement and those independent shops, Apple has gradually made it easier to access its computers since 2021.
But “easier” isn’t the same as “easy,” which is why it was a surprise to discover no adhesive in sight in the MacBook Neo teardown video by Australian repair channel Tech Re-Nu. Instead, the laptop’s design is a sensible mix of components with routed cables all held in place by screws. Lots and lots of screws.
The good thing about those screws: They’re now-standard T3, T5 and T8 Torx screws versus the obscure heads like the pentalobe screw Apple has used over the years to dissuade people from getting into their machines.
This assembly approach makes sense given that the MacBook Neos were designed for the education market. If you’ve had to deal with the plastic-cased Chromebooks that many schools assign, you’ll know that keyboards and screens are especially vulnerable to, well, students.
Being built of aluminum with better Apple fit and finish will surely help the MacBook Neo’s longevity, but it will also be beneficial if a school’s IT department can replace those components in-house. In fact, as MacRumors noticed when looking at the MacBook Neo repair manual, the keyboard can be replaced individually without having to order an entire top case of the laptop.
Before you get your hopes up, though, the MacBook Neo logic board still has everything soldered on, so you can’t swap in more RAM or storage as was possible in old PowerBook and early MacBook models. In fact, the logic board is incredibly small, no doubt due to its A18 Pro processor’s heritage powering the iPhone 16 Pro.
The MacBook Neo continues to surprise, from its fresh colors to the performance of that processor, even with a bare 8GB of RAM. If you ever need to access the components inside, it’s better to be (un)screwed than stuck.
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