Apple's new MacBook Neo is its most repairable laptop since 2014, earning a 6/10 score from iFixit due to design improvements like using screws instead of glue for key components.
Despite these improvements, its repairability score remains moderate because its memory is soldered to the main board, preventing easy upgrades and potentially limiting future AI application performance.
The laptop is seen as targeting the education market, competing with easily repairable Chromebooks, though Apple's overall design philosophy has historically prioritized thinness over repairability.
Main topics: MacBook Neo repairability, iFixit's teardown analysis, comparison to Chromebooks in education, design limitations for upgrades and AI.
Apple's MacBook Neo, the laptop it announced last week that starts at $499 for students, is the most repairable laptop the company has released since 2014, according to an analysis released Friday by iFixit.
iFixit publishes repair guides and sells parts and tools for consumer electronic devices, but also provides ratings for how easy items are to fix and âkeep running. â Laptop makers â such as Dell Tech and Lenovo Group have used those ratings to improve the repairability of their products.
In the âteardown published on Friday, iFixit found that Apple had made key changes from previous laptops, such as âattaching the computer's batteries and keyboard with screws rather than glue or rivets, and making it easy to swap out parts such as the device's camera and fingerprint sensor.
Apple is widely believed to be targeting the same education markets with its â MacBook Neo âthat Google targets with its low-cost Chromebooks. Kyle Wiens, iFixit's chief executive, said Chromebooks are frequently repaired, with some school districts such as those in Oakland, California â even tapping student interns to fix them.
But Apple's MacBook Neo still scored only a 6 out of 10 on iFixit's scale, where other machines such as a recent Lenovo ThinkPad have scored 9s and 10s.
Apple, which has prioritized thinner and lighter devices over the past decade, has made its products harder to repair.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wiens said one of the reasons is that MacBook Neo's 8 gigabytes of DRAM are directly soldered to the âcircuit board of the machine as part of a package with the machine's main processing chip, which is similar to all of Apple's Mac designs in ârecent years but âwill make MacBook Neos â impossible to easily upgrade with more memory.
Wiens said that could make it hard for the MacBook Neo to run artificial intelligence applications as they grow in complexity in the coming years, even âas Apple has publicly cited the privacy benefits of running those applications on a laptop instead of in the cloud. He said Apple could improve its offerings by including an additional layer of memory chips that users can upgrade.
"Apple's future for privacy-centered AI has to be local models," Wiens said. "I would argue this is a flaw across Apple's entire Mac product line."
iFixit publishes repair guides and sells parts and tools for consumer electronic devices, but also provides ratings for how easy items are to fix and âkeep running. â Laptop makers â such as Dell Tech and Lenovo Group have used those ratings to improve the repairability of their products.
In the âteardown published on Friday, iFixit found that Apple had made key changes from previous laptops, such as âattaching the computer's batteries and keyboard with screws rather than glue or rivets, and making it easy to swap out parts such as the device's camera and fingerprint sensor.
Apple is widely believed to be targeting the same education markets with its â MacBook Neo âthat Google targets with its low-cost Chromebooks. Kyle Wiens, iFixit's chief executive, said Chromebooks are frequently repaired, with some school districts such as those in Oakland, California â even tapping student interns to fix them.
But Apple's MacBook Neo still scored only a 6 out of 10 on iFixit's scale, where other machines such as a recent Lenovo ThinkPad have scored 9s and 10s.
Apple, which has prioritized thinner and lighter devices over the past decade, has made its products harder to repair.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wiens said one of the reasons is that MacBook Neo's 8 gigabytes of DRAM are directly soldered to the âcircuit board of the machine as part of a package with the machine's main processing chip, which is similar to all of Apple's Mac designs in ârecent years but âwill make MacBook Neos â impossible to easily upgrade with more memory.
Wiens said that could make it hard for the MacBook Neo to run artificial intelligence applications as they grow in complexity in the coming years, even âas Apple has publicly cited the privacy benefits of running those applications on a laptop instead of in the cloud. He said Apple could improve its offerings by including an additional layer of memory chips that users can upgrade.
"Apple's future for privacy-centered AI has to be local models," Wiens said. "I would argue this is a flaw across Apple's entire Mac product line."
Meridiano
