The common narrative around device design is that you can have repairability or a low price, but that they are inversely proportional to each other. Apple’s new budget MacBook Neo seems to attempt a bit of both.
Brittle snap-fit enclosures or glue can make a device pop together quickly during manufacture, but are a headache when it comes time to repair or hack it. Our friends at iFixit tore down the Neo and found it to be the most repairable MacBook since the 2012 unibody model. A screwed in battery, and modules for many of the individual components including the USB ports and headphone jack make it fairly simple to replace individual components. Most of those components are even accessible as soon as you pop the bottom cover instead of requiring major surgery.
As someone who has done a keyboard replacement on a 2010 MacBook, the 41 screws holding the keyboard in brought back (bad) memories. While this is a great improvement over Apple’s notoriously painful repair processes, we’re still only looking at an overall 6/10 score from iFixit versus a 10/10 from Framework or Lenovo.
The real story here is that these improvements from Apple were spurred by Right-to-Repair developments, particularly in the EU, that were the result of pressure from hackers like you.
If you want to push a Neo even further, how about water cooling it? If you’d rather have user-upgradeable RAM and storage too in a Mac, you’ve got to go a bit older.
Although Apple isn’t my top pick, I am really happy to see them making real strides on these issues. I did an essay in high school on right to repair, and I remember writing on Apple and John Deere. Nice to see Apple making progress.
That’s the first mac I’d consider buying tbh… definitely not for me but if someone really wants to get into that ecosystem…
Windows is such an execrable piece of shit now, a Mac is the only viable consumer-friendly option. I can’t wait to shitcan my parents’ Windows laptops in favor of the Neo.
Or save the Windows laptops with Linux for free…
I’m not up to date with everything but even if you nuke Windows you still have the Intel IME nonsense that’s impossible to expunge from a lot of modern hardware – which makes Apple look at least like a better option if not a great one.
non IT competent friendly != consumer friendly…
currently neither windows nor mac are consumer friendly…
But linux is, especially when it disables support for old CPUs or has kernel level 0-day exploits that were (not really) picked up by billiards of milliards of volunteers reading code 24/7 🤡
FWIW you can still download Windows 98 ISO and run it on vintage 486 PC to play games. Try that with linux 😂
definitely don’t put words into my mouth, I definitely didn’t meant that linux is consumer friendly :) I was just responding to the windows is shit mac is consumer friendly, when it definitely isn’t either :)
Or it was necessary because the motherboard is from a Cellphone 🤷🏼♂️
Also here to point out that Apple has a tablet with a laptop/desktop processor, and now a laptop with a Cellphone processor.
And Valve is still going to beat them to x86 gaming on an ARM, what a wacky time to live. The M1 or M2 (or M3 or M4) would have been a great time to make their products play PC games, as it is arguably a contender for graphics processing power (and has Vulkan?). But hey, maybe with the M5. Also crazy considering they literally needed a translation layer when they switched from Intel to their own silicon, so they aren’t completely oblivious to the concept. But I guess the money is spent on . . . VR development?
They don’t want x86 games on their platform, nor do they want Vulkan. They want ARM native games using Metal.
That was what stopped me from going with one of the m4 ipads, it is powerful but it is heavily restricted likely because they don’t want it to compete with macbooks. If it was able to run the MacBook OS or at least programs similarly to it then it probably would have been enough for me.
Instead I went for a Microsoft surface pro 11 with the snapdragon X elite. Largely it is very good, very few compatibility issues and able to reasonably play steam games, about what you would expect from such a device. It has a few issues with freezing or going very slow but I have a feeling that is just because it is windows and only had 16 GB of RAM shared with the iGPU, or since it mostly happens with chrome and not games it could just be chrome.
Haha, Lenovo is well known for repairability sonce before Framework, so this is more of a return to form for them.
Why HP and Dell still refuse to make their commercial grade laptops repairable is beyond me. It’s not just the design, Dell is notorious for confusing naming schemes and completely different and incompatible wiring and connectors among different specifications of the same laptop.
Lenovo however will give you part numbers for free online, not even a sign-in required and is famously cross compatible.
I sometimes get myself into confusing situations where I have swapped a Gen6 laptop for a Gen8 lid, and one is a faster 4 core with slower DDR4 while the other is a one-year 6 core with lower latency DDR3. But unlike Dell I usually always wind up with a functional laptop.
Dell are pills, but I’ll point out that HP, like Lenovo, makes service manuals available for download for their consumer laptops right from the HP support site. Which ain’t nothing. (And is a lot more than Dell, Sony, Toshiba, etc. do.)
Even brand new, currently-for-sale models like the latest OmniBook 5s have a service manual download. And that’s a model line where the oldest driver packages in the download area are dated December 2025.
(I do not work for HP.)
ASUS also seem to be pretty good about this. Their support site has a “Service Guide and Maintenance” tab for every model’s support page, and there are manuals dated a month ago for some of their newest models.
I like passively cooled performant laptops and this is as far as I know the best one available today. I just wish it ran Linux not Mac OS so docker could run without VM overhead. I hope this gets Asahi Linux one day.
I am holding out for an M7 Mac under the jackboot of European repairability mandates
seriously saying this is their most repairable laptop is not setting the bar very high. Yeah the ball moved a bit in our direction but when they went soooo far in the other direction this is still a huge loss for the consumers overall.
Not for consumers who don’t buy them to repair. Which I’m guessing is nearly all of them.
No, it’s because it was heavily designed for cheap assembly, at the expense of other factors like weight, size, and waterproofing. Daring Fireball has a much better explanation of the design choices, and how the Mac Neo came to be released.
the weird thing is my ‘back in the day’ white plastic ibook g4 was actually pretty repairable, at least as far as i cared…particularly easy to replace the keyboard and battery, and of course the wall wart (designed to fail). and easy to upgrade the RAM too. don’t know if it would have been easy to replace the speakers or lcd but i’ve never wanted to replace any other laptop components…
Framework posted a nice comparison of repairability of their Framework 12 vs the MacBook Neo. Every step they give the Neo a generous head start and still come out ahead:
https://youtu.be/uvYt1GgcsUI?is=QKlp-62TVQQpD7Cd
a1278/a1286 was very repairable in my experience