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Apple's MacBook Neo makes repairs easier and cheaper than other MacBooks
- 0xDEFACED 7mo agoi sure hope so if apple intends to sell these things to school divisions. the levels of abuse i witnessed students dishing out to their chromebooks when i was a teacher was shocking to say the least
- entropicdrifter 7mo agoI feel like "most repairable macbook" is a bit like saying "most edible dirt". While it's good that there's progress, it's pretty telling that they need to only compare it within the same company's products.
- Someone1234 7mo agoI'd suggest you watch a teardown video. The Neo is absurdly repairable compared to just about anything in its category. It is extremely modular, and uses screws.
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoRepairability examples: modular USB ports; battery sans glue; trackpad Twenty years ago, I worked part-time in a laptop repair facility for a large educational institution; this computer would have been a godsend (e.g. the first MacBooks had hundreds of screws, plastic everywhere).
- MBCook 7mo agoKeyboard that doesn’t require half the computer to be thrown away to replace it! That probably bit them HARD during the butterfly days.
- ProllyInfamous 7mo ago>the butterfly days I skipped that entire generation, but the modern silicon keyboards are slick. My workshop computer is a 2012 MacBook "Pro" (disabled GPU), which also has fantastic keys. Best Apple keyboard ever has to be the 12" PowerBook G4, but that may just be nostalgic... ---- My major critique of the Neo is: for its intended market (younger), it should be more durable, not less — why is there no MagSafe power connector? From a computer repair technician's POV, there will be lot$ of U$B port replacement$, due to power supply abusers (have you seen some students' charging cables?!). From manufacturer's POV: if they had MagSafe, they probably wouldn't need separate USB ports (IMHO). It's almost guaranteed that the second revision of this product line will use MagSafe (you own the patent already!).
- MBCook 7mo agoCost. It’s 100% cost. The USB-C port that’s already there anyway is free, thus way cheaper. No special port. No special cable in the box. I don’t think it will come in the next revision.
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoIt is literally the main reason I would purchase an Air (were I in the market — am not). 15" screen would be reason#2. There were several generations of Apple laptops that mysteriously didn't have MagSafe — I never bought one — very glad to see its return on my own M3MBAir15".
- mmmlinux 7mo agoMost laptops back then were filled with tons of screws.
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoTell me about it. Even decades later, whenever my limbic dreaming needs "random technical noise" it still pulls up images of early 2000s laptop screw bins. For nightmares, the screwbin either tips over repeatedly, or a dropped screw poofs indefinitely. Sometimes I wake up sweated, snackycaked crumb constellations jambed up'gainst bedsheets and fattie. Screws, everywhere. Me.
- edhelas 7mo agoWow screws. Crazy. So the industry standard for many years. But I guess it's Different™ this time.
- 0_____0 7mo agoI've replaced a battery, screen, hinges on a macbook (2015). Did they get considerably worse at repairability after that? Because while there were a fair number of steps, it's not like they required exotic techniques to pull off.
- shrubble 7mo agoYes they did. Reminder: your experience is 11 years ago and several Intel and ARM generations old. Also it’s more than $3 Trillion in revenue ago.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoThey’ve gotten largely more repairable since then, including adhesives you can electrically debond.
- malmeloo 7mo agoThat's a relatively recent development. Repairability has been very poor for quite a while, but now they're finally starting to improve the situation somewhat.
- the_biot 7mo ago...electrically debond, are you serious? More details please, this sounds very interesting.
- 05 7mo agoVideo (use SponsorBlock): https://youtu.be/M6jBXI6CR9s?t=156 https://youtu.be/M6jBXI6CR9s?t=156 Article: https://www.ifixit.com/News/100352/we-hot-wired-the-iphone-16 https://www.ifixit.com/News/100352/we-hot-wired-the-iphone-1... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41623251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41623251
- alwillis 7mo agoNot $3 trillion in revenue; a $3 trillion market cap.
- lallysingh 7mo agoYeah, I mean I'm looking at frameworks/thinkpads on one side and chromebooks on the other. Not charging up to $440 (!) for a keyboard isn't a great act of engineering or generosity. This has been ridiculous for a very, very long time. Being less ridiculous isn't worth celebrating. The goal markers have moved so damned much. Compare to a thinkpad keyboard FRU. They have fluid drains and still cost $99 for a top-end laptop. My daughter's chromebook keyboard replacement at school was $16.
- tpmoney 7mo ago> This has been ridiculous for a very, very long time. Being less ridiculous isn't worth celebrating. So what I'm hearing is you don't want Apple to make their computers more repairable? Think of this like training a dog. My dog can open the cabinet in the kitchen on their own, pull out a specific requested item, close the door again and bring the item to me from anywhere in my house. Opening a door is just tugging on something, bringing something to me is just fetch, closing a door is just pushing with its nose. If I went into the training of this with the attitude of "oh wow, you pulled the door open" or "oh wow, you fetched the thing" and didn't reward my dog for doing those simple pieces because "any good dog can tug on a rope or fetch a ball", then my dog would never have gotten to the point of doing all of those things in a repeatable complex sequence that serves a useful purpose. Instead every part of it that my dog got right, they got all sorts of praise and rewards. And so once I started asking more, my dog eagerly tried to do those things because they knew if they did what I wanted, they could get the things they wanted. Train your companies the same way. Give them the positive PR and praise they're looking for when they do the things you want them to do. You'll get them to do what you want a lot faster if they have an actual incentive to do it.
- Someone1234 7mo agoI just want to link this teardown; it is a suitable companion to this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k7Lv7f-5CQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k7Lv7f-5CQ On a rational level it isn't surprising that the "compute" part is so small, given its origins, but for some reason it still caught me by surprised seeing something barely larger than a Raspberry Pi. But, yeah, this thing is crazy modular. I particularly want to call out how trivial it is to replace the ports, given how common of a failure point they are. With the keyboard/monitor being more involved, but absolutely still approachable. I believe he finds just a single piece of light adhesive keeping a cable in place, everything else (inc. the battery) is screws only.
- ggreer 7mo agoIt looks like it's still bigger than the logic board on the 12" MacBook from 2015.[1] I really wish Apple would resurrect that form factor, as every other MacBook since has seemed bulky in comparison. Thanks to OpenCore Legacy Patcher[2], I still haven't gotten a newer mac. With a modern M series chip, it wouldn't have such rough tradeoffs in battery life and performance. I'd definitely buy it. 1. See step 11 on https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2015+Teardown/39841#s89806 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2015+Teardown... 2. https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
- 46493168 7mo agoWhat version of MacOS are you running on yours? I have a 2017, 16GB, 1.7ghz and it's DOG slow on Ventura, even with reduce motion and reduce transparency. I have considered downgrading just to see if there's improvement.
- ggreer 7mo agoI'm on Sequoia (v15.7.4). I have the original 2015 model (1.1Ghz Core M-5Y31, 8GB of RAM). It's a little slow, but fine for what I use it for (web browser, syncing music/photos to/from my phone, simple coding tasks). My main gripe is the battery only has 60% of its original capacity. Apple won't replace the battery, and doing it yourself is pretty tricky. At some point it'll break or no longer get security updates, and then I'll probably get a MacBook Air. If you're using OpenCore Patcher, it's important to install the root patches to enable graphics acceleration. Otherwise it'll be ridiculously slow.
- drooopy 7mo agoThis is probably going to be my new laptop next year if it gets the A19 Pro with 12 GB of RAM.
- etchalon 7mo agoI'd bet these things are going to be on a two-year upgrade cycle, instead of yearly. Will be super happy to be proven wrong.
- ErneX 7mo agoThey released the 17e a year after 16e so there’s hope.
- intrasight 7mo agoThis one will be my new laptop this year, and I'll then see what happens next year.
- qingcharles 7mo agoLiterally the only thing wrong with these is the RAM is so borderline in 2026. 12GB would have been right on the money for an upgrade options.
- illiac786 7mo ago100% that. So frustrating. Their lifespan is artificially short because of this.
- oybng 7mo agoJust 20 steps and 18 screws to replace a battery, easy!
- SoKamil 7mo agoBut no adhesive under the battery. That’s huge.
- butILoveLife 7mo ago[flagged]
- ryandrake 7mo agoI'll take it over the plastic pieces of garbage that flex and bend and creek, and feel like they were taped together by a 6 year old, which is most other PC laptops in this price range.
- butILoveLife 7mo ago[flagged]
- rogerrogerr 7mo agoIt's functional to have a laptop you can pick up from a corner without waking anyone sleeping in the same building.
- ryandrake 7mo agoThis is part of what's plagued the PC laptop industry for decades: Obsession with specs and measurements and geekbenches and similar things, over "does this feel like a cracker jack toy?" and "will the hinge break if I open the lid?"
- crooked-v 7mo agoAs it turns out, once battery life hits a certain baseline, people prefer devices where the battery is harder to replace but larger over devices where the battery is hot-swappable but smaller.
- newsclues 7mo agoI'm not sure if it's possible, but an aftermarket battery with closer to the MB Airs KW/h specs would be a very interesting modification. The repairability seems to be interesting especially if it leads to framework style upgradability (logic boards, not the ports).
- pfortuny 7mo agoFYI: KWh (it is a product).
- hyperhello 7mo agoYeah, that would be an interesting modification, wouldn’t it?
- newsclues 7mo agoLink? Searching for such a generic term didn’t reveal anything
- svpk 7mo agoThey mean in the sense of sum, product, difference, and quotient. The comment they were replying to said KW/h (a quotient), but the term is KWh which is a product.
- jajuuka 7mo agoI'd bet dollars to donuts that it either treats any battery connection like the stock battery or it fails over to a run like crap mode like third party batteries in their phones.
- newsclues 7mo agoIf the BMS onboard the batteries only exposes the same power as the stock battery I don’t know how it would know
- needSomeCoffee 7mo agoWow. Beautiful engineering. Please, please Apple use this ethos for all future major laptop re-designs e.g. MBA & MBP.
- MBCook 7mo agoWhen they did this to the low end iPhones, it “trickled up” to better models later. I suspect they’ll do that on laptops too. I hope they do.
- butILoveLife 7mo ago[flagged]
- cwoolfe 7mo agoRepairability and cost are key for the education market. Apple sold iPads into this space for awhile but there's been pushback and talk of going to chromebooks. Seems like they are positioning Neo for this segment as well.
- intrasight 7mo agoI am WAY out of school and I still care about repairability and cost ;)
- reaperducer 7mo agothere's been pushback and talk of going to chromebooks There's been talk of the education market going to Chromebooks? Did we just fall into a wormhole to 2014?
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoCan we bring computer labs back into education, instead of K-12 all having their own laptops?!? Why does a primary schooler need to "access an online assignment portal" to turn in his assignment?!? You can make a good argument (perhaps) for high schoolers having access to personal laptops, but this shouldn't be allowed on the whim of all classroom hours. We are failing our next generation, massively — it's already washing out in Gen Alpha's testscores/employability. ---- background: attended college on a teaching scholarship, twenty years ago; immediately left heartbreak of education, breaking repayment contract, to attend grad school; still jaded from that uncredentialed five-figure expense
- cwoolfe 7mo agoyes. I think EdTech can be helpful for learning; but having immediate access to the rest of the internet at the same time negated whatever benefit EdTech would have had. I think that's why all the data from the EdTech companies shows a benefit in controlled studies of just their product, but the rest of our overall academic achievement data shows a net decline ever since portable screens were introduced into life and education.
- euroderf 7mo agoIs the Neo in a price range where it could be attached to a robot chassis as its processsor and UI ? Connectivity, video, audio, status display, even a Max Headroom. USB-C plug-n-go.
- edhelas 7mo agoSo basically they are trying to reach what Lenovo and others are doing for years. Nice Apple. That's good :)
- ajay-b 7mo agoThis is really good to read. I hung on to my 2012 MBP for the replaceable battery, hard drive, and memory far longer than I wanted to. It's great having a thinner machine, but repairability - really extending its longevity - will always be a huge selling point for me. I have bitterly disliked the idea of "disposable technology."
- vablings 7mo agoWould I be a little crazy to buy one of these and make an SBC adaptor board. Also getting IOS to run on these devices might not be astronomically difficult considering we have seen quite a few M series iPad running MacOS
- alex7o 7mo agoThis is the same chip as the iphone, the only thing that need to be done is make something like m1n1 work with iOS and circumvent all the security measures
- wvenable 7mo agoThe teardown is impressive. The next question is whether anyone other than Apple will be able to get parts.
- anhner 7mo agoThanks, EU! A lot more gadgets will come out this year with improved repairability because of an EU requirement starting next year: https://repair.eu/news/making-batteries-removable-and-replaceable-a-closer-look-at-the-new-eu-guidelines/ https://repair.eu/news/making-batteries-removable-and-replac...
- anhner 7mo agoIt's unbelievable how many EU haters are on this sub. Literally anything good it does, if you point it put you get downvoted. Stay classy. Or perhaps you believe that this year all manufacturers, Apple especially, decided out of the goodness of their hearts that their devices need to be repairable?
- prmoustache 7mo agoApple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery. Judging by the sorry state of most second hand Macbook it really feel that they have made their hardware disposable (despite using relatively premium hardware like aluminum compared to plastic stuff on some brands) to force people to subscribe to it. Not that they are the only one to make shitty unreliable stuff (looking at you Asus, Acer and most brand's "family" lines).
- wilg 7mo agopretty sure apple tops reliability metrics reliably, so this is probably more about your feelings than reality
- MBCook 7mo agoJust like when they did this on the iPhones I suspect this is all self-serving. It’s about making it easier and faster for Apple to fix the machines. It benefits us all. But I suspect the cost of their super tight integration into large non-replaceable components with lots of glue started to show up in repair work costs.
- wilg 7mo agoThis machine is probably more repairable because its simpler and bulkier and more cost conscious.
- reaperducer 7mo agoApple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery. It's not about "having to" replace parts. It's for just-in-case. It's essentially insurance. The battery in my M1 MacBook Pro went bad recently. But I have AppleCare, so I was able to walk into an Apple Store and hand it to someone, and the next day I picked it up all repaired. (New keyboard, too, since the keyboard and battery are considered one part.) Total cost without AppleCare: $250 + tax. Total cost with AppleCare: $0. Total I've spent on AppleCare: $150. If I had some machine from Dell or Acer or even Microsoft, what would I do? Ship it back to China for six months? There's no store I can walk into to get it fixed the next day. The value in AppleCare is the same value you have in fire insurance. Maybe you want to save a few bucks and take your chances that everything you own won't burn to ashes and you have to start over with nothing. I'm not in college anymore.
- butILoveLife 7mo ago[flagged]
- rconti 7mo agoI've never felt lucky when reading a post from someone whining about downvotes.
- Jtsummers 7mo agoApple criticism is actually very common on this site, and often not flagged. Whining gets flagged, though. > You are lucky if you see this. You're new here so you may not know this, but you can turn on "showdead" in your profile and you won't need luck to see [dead] comments and submissions. It's been a feature since the beginning (or near it).
- tsunamifury 7mo agothis is a re-arranged iPhone inside a larger case with a bigger battery no?
- fckgw 7mo agoI mean yeah, the same way an iPhone is a rearranged Macbook in a smaller case with a smaller battery.
- tsunamifury 7mo ago[flagged]
- brudgers 7mo agoThe bar set by “Cheaper to repair than other Apple laptops” is wheelchair accessible.
- Brajeshwar 7mo agoWishful thinking: Apple releases Veronica Veronica is an ultra-light MacBook based on Neo, lighter than the MacBook Air. It becomes way more powerful once you connect your iPhone directly. Reference: Veronica is the Iron Man Armor that snaps onto Iron Man to handle Hulk.
- nindalf 7mo agoThe armour is Hulkbuster. The satellite that launches it is Veronica.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoThe one thing I'd really miss here is the backlit keyboard. Too bad they cut it. And made it not even an option. Including that omission it's very reminiscent of the surface laptop go. I'm surprised other reviews haven't made that connection. Similar price, features, the works. Even missing the fingerprint on the base model, just like the surface laptop go. The funky colours. People are acting like apple invented this class of midrange laptop but they didn't.
- vablings 7mo agoI always found a backlit keyboard to be visually distracting and had it on the lowest setting for my old M1. I literally never have to look at the keyboard when typing even with mac quirks
- wolvoleo 7mo agoI do because I have so many different computers so I don't build fingerspitzengefühl. And its not just for typing. I use the keyboard for navigation too. Like Arrow keys and page up/down. Those are a pain to use on Mac laptops which makes finding them even more important.
- sumek83 7mo agoThat makes me suddenly way more interested in the upcoming redesign of the Pro laptops. I don't care about pretty much anything else that is gossiped about, but a reperaible design would be sweet