- The MacBook Neo has been taken apart on YouTube
- The content creator found the laptop incredibly easy to take apart
- That should make it much easier to repair than most Apple laptops
Apple laptops have a reputation for being particularly difficult to work on once opened, with components often glued in place or buried under lots of intricate routing and incredibly delicate cabling. So it comes as a surprise that the all-new MacBook Neo is, in the words of one reviewer, “absolutely fantastic” in this regard.
It 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 to people wanting to open it up and get at its innards.
For example, Tech Re-Nu pointed out that there were no sticky tabs holding the MacBook Neo’s speakers in place, while the headphone jack was completely modular, which Tech Re-Nu described as “very nice work by Apple.” It comes after similar conclusions from a teardown by YouTuber Dave2D.
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In fact, Tech Re-Nu was surprisingly effusive in its praise of the MacBook Neo and its disassembly process, saying, “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 too, nothing like hinges — it’s as sleek or elegant.”
Why has Apple done this?
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Apple has often found itself in the crosshairs of right-to-repair activists, who say its penchant for making its laptops hard to tear down makes them much harder to repair, which in turn can contribute to high levels of e-waste. On top of that, this type of device can become more expensive for users who have to buy a new device when they might – theoretically – have been able to repair it instead if it was easier.
The likelihood is that Apple operates this way because of a long-standing desire to make its products as compact and as simple (externally) as possible. Both Steve Jobs and Apple’s former chief designer Jony Ive believed that Apple products should be free of unnecessary extras, and this often extended to empty space—an apocryphal story has Jobs dropping an iPod prototype into an aquarium and pointing to the new bubbles as evidence that there was too much unused space inside the device.
As a result, Apple tries to pack the insides of its devices as tightly as possible, ensuring that it manages to include advanced components while keeping the dimensions of the product as slim as possible. One result of this is the incredibly tightly constructed internals that are a nightmare to tear down for all but the most skilled of hangmen.
Apparently, however, the MacBook Neo is different. Because it cuts many of the more advanced components commonly found inside other Macs, it’s much easier to manage internally. For example, the motherboard is tiny, while the battery simply lifts out when the screws are removed, without the need to deal with adhesive or built-in tabs.
Another reason for Apple’s simplified collection could be pressure from the right to fix campaigners. The movement has achieved some significant victories in recent years, and Apple has felt compelled to provide users with repair tools and guides, something it never used to allow in the past. As regulators increasingly target big tech companies, Apple may have decided to pre-empt any potential investigation by changing how it assembles the MacBook Neo. However, that conclusion will depend on whether the M5 MacBook Air and the M5 Pro MacBook Pro are equally easy to take apart – which is so far unknown.
What we saw in Tech Re-Nu’s video was a laptop that is nicely put together without being overly burdensome to repair. And that’s good news for anyone who might want to rummage around in their MacBook Neo if something goes wrong.
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