‘I can’t say we’ve ever had a Mac that looks as repairable and as modular as this one’: MacBook Neo teardown reveals a surprisingly accessible laptop

• The MacBook Neo has been disassembled on YouTube
• The content creator found the laptop to be incredibly easy to take apart
• That should make it much easier to repair than most Apple laptops

Apple’s laptops have a reputation for being particularly difficult to work on once they’re opened up, with components often glued in place or buried under masses of intricately routed and incredibly delicate cabling. So it comes as some surprise that the brand-new MacBook Neo is, in the words of one reviewer, “absolutely amazing” in this regard.

That comes from a teardown video published by Tech Re-Nu on YouTube. There, the content creator felt that Apple’s latest laptop was unusually accommodating of people who want to open it up and get at its internals.

For instance, Tech Re-Nu pointed out that there were no sticky tabs holding the MacBook Neo’s speakers in place, while the headphone jack was entirely modular, which Tech Re-Nu described as “very nice work from Apple.” That comes after similar conclusions from a teardown performed by YouTuber Dave2D.

Indeed, Tech Re-Nu was surprisingly effusive in its praise for the MacBook Neo and its disassembly process, stating: “I can’t say we’ve ever had a Mac that looks as repairable and as modular as this one. No sticky tape, no tricky adhesives, modular parts, minimal parts as well, no hinge covers or anything like that. It’s just super-straightforward, elegant design.”

Why has Apple done this?

MacBook Neo Teardown: The Most Repairable Mac Yet? - YouTube

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Apple has often found itself in the sights of right to repair activists who say its penchant for making its laptops tough to tear down makes them much more difficult to repair, which in turn can contribute to high levels of e-waste. As well as that, this type of device can become more expensive for users who need to buy a new device when – theoretically – they might have been able to repair it instead if doing so was easier.

The likelihood is that Apple operates this way due to a long-standing desire to make its products as compact and as simple (on the outside) as possible. Both Steve Jobs and Apple’s former chief designer Jony Ive believed that Apple’s products should be free from needless extras, and that often extended to empty space – one apocryphal story has Jobs dropping an iPod prototype into a fish tank and pointing to the emerging bubbles as proof that there was too much unused space inside the device.

As a result, Apple tries to pack its devices’ insides as tightly as possible, ensuring it manages to include advanced components while keeping the product’s dimensions as slimline as possible. One upshot of this is the incredibly densely engineered internals that are a nightmare to tear down for all but the most adept of tinkerers.

Evidently, however, the MacBook Neo is different. Because it cuts a lot of the more advanced components commonly found inside other Macs, it’s a lot easier to manage on the inside. The motherboard, for example, is tiny, while the battery simply lifts out once its screws are removed, without the need to deal with adhesive or built-in tabs.

Another reason for Apple’s simplified assembly could be the pressure from right to repair campaigners. The movement has scored some significant wins in recent years and Apple has felt compelled to issue users with repair tools and guides, something that it never used to permit in the past. With regulators increasingly targeting Big Tech firms, Apple might have decided to preempt any potential scrutiny by changing how it puts the MacBook Neo together. That conclusion, though, will depend on whether the M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro MacBook Pro are similarly easy to disassemble – which, for now, remains unknown.

What we saw in Tech Re-Nu’s video was a laptop that is neatly put together without being overly burdensome to repair. And that’s good news for anyone who might want to poke around inside their MacBook Neo if something goes wrong.

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