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.
It 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.
The Neo actually has similar dimensions to the 12” overall, though not as tapered. That’s possible because it has a much slimmer bezel. The Neo is about a third heavier though.
What 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.
I'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.
By dimensions, assuming the 2015 ("eleven year old") version, the 13" M4 MBA is 0.17" wider, 0.9" deeper, and 0.32 lbs heavier. Where it's harder to compare is thickness. The M4 is 0.44" thick where the Intel one was tapered (0.11"-0.68").
Kind of hard to see that as "HUGE" in comparison. Bigger? Yes, but not really huge.
Apple 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).
Apple stuff lasts me longer than any other computers I've purchased in my life. The Mac had a bit of a dark age in the late 2010s but barring that, I think it's incorrect to say Apple products are unreliable.
I bought a late-2013 13" MacBook Pro when I started university and I used that thing up until the end of 2021 when I got a 14" M1 Pro MBP. And it wasn't even because it was performing that terribly, I just wanted the new Apple silicon machine. Now it's ~4.5 years later and that machine runs like it did on day 1 and I have no desire to upgrade anytime soon.
I had Apple Care on my 2006 MacBook. It covered around €3000 in repairs. Especially the logic board replacements added up fast. Couple of palm rests as well though that was also covered by extended warranty.
I paid $50 for that Apple Care through an eBay listing and got send a code that I could use to register. This was back when Apple Care was sold in physical boxes and people would resell them from foreign countries. So great deal all round.
But for the rest I never had Apple Care on anything.
> 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.
This whole post is a [citation needed] on multiple fronts.
Apple 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.
Just 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.
Repairability 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.
i 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
Would 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
This 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
This 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."
Is 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.
The guy in the linked video up thread tore the whole computer down in 6 minutes. I'm pretty sure most people can manage to find 12 minutes out of their life every 5 years to replace the battery if they want. But if that is too arduous, you can pay Apple to do it for you for a mere $149, with the battery included in that price. Given that a comparable battery from iFixit will cost you $80-$100, that's just ~$50 to have someone save you the hassle of having to remove 18 screws from your laptop every 5 years.
Apple’s official illustrated guide shows you only need to pop the 8 case screws, 2 screws holding down the battery connector, then route the cables away and remove the 18 battery screws.
I mean, yes, it is easy. No adhesive and just a couple of clips on the case. You could replace the battery in 20 minutes with little anxiety that you're going to cause damage getting to it.
As 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.
I'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.
I 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.
I'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.
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).
Yeah, 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.
> 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.
I'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.
Over 11 years, they exceeded $3 trillion in revenue, actually. I knew it was a lot, hadn't actually looked at the totals before. 2015-2025 sums to $3.429 trillion.
That'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.
I just want to link this teardown; it is a suitable companion to this article:
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.
It 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...
2. https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
The Neo actually has similar dimensions to the 12” overall, though not as tapered. That’s possible because it has a much slimmer bezel. The Neo is about a third heavier though.
If you account for the taper, the Neo has about 50% more volume than the 12”
I sometimes travel with backpack only (cheap European airlines) and that is a big difference.
What 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.
I'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.
I just helped a friend replace her eleven year old 11" Macbook Air with a new M4 Air.
her review: “this thing is HUGE :( :P ”
By dimensions, assuming the 2015 ("eleven year old") version, the 13" M4 MBA is 0.17" wider, 0.9" deeper, and 0.32 lbs heavier. Where it's harder to compare is thickness. The M4 is 0.44" thick where the Intel one was tapered (0.11"-0.68").
Kind of hard to see that as "HUGE" in comparison. Bigger? Yes, but not really huge.
It seems like a normal-sized motherboard? For comparison here is the ifixit teardown of a PixelBook Go (happens to be the laptop I am using right now). https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/LT6YEIeE1Svh4WCk.hug...
This is probably going to be my new laptop next year if it gets the A19 Pro with 12 GB of RAM.
Literally 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.
I'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.
They released the 17e a year after 16e so there’s hope.
The new naming of iPhones makes sense for a yearly update, not so much for the Neo.
This one will be my new laptop this year, and I'll then see what happens next year.
Apple 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).
Apple stuff lasts me longer than any other computers I've purchased in my life. The Mac had a bit of a dark age in the late 2010s but barring that, I think it's incorrect to say Apple products are unreliable.
I bought a late-2013 13" MacBook Pro when I started university and I used that thing up until the end of 2021 when I got a 14" M1 Pro MBP. And it wasn't even because it was performing that terribly, I just wanted the new Apple silicon machine. Now it's ~4.5 years later and that machine runs like it did on day 1 and I have no desire to upgrade anytime soon.
I had Apple Care on my 2006 MacBook. It covered around €3000 in repairs. Especially the logic board replacements added up fast. Couple of palm rests as well though that was also covered by extended warranty.
I paid $50 for that Apple Care through an eBay listing and got send a code that I could use to register. This was back when Apple Care was sold in physical boxes and people would resell them from foreign countries. So great deal all round.
But for the rest I never had Apple Care on anything.
Apple care is about user fuckups, not Apple's.
Some people use computers with utter disregard for their integrity.
Macs, specially Apple silicon ones are extremely reliable.
> 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.
This whole post is a [citation needed] on multiple fronts.
Apple 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.)
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.
[delayed]
pretty sure apple tops reliability metrics reliably, so this is probably more about your feelings than reality
Just 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.
This machine is probably more repairable because its simpler and bulkier and more cost conscious.
Repairability 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.
I am WAY out of school and I still care about repairability and cost ;)
there'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?
i 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
Wow. Beautiful engineering. Please, please Apple use this ethos for all future major laptop re-designs e.g. MBA & MBP.
When 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.
Would 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
This 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
This 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."
The teardown is impressive. The next question is whether anyone other than Apple will be able to get parts.
Apple has a third party sell them - https://selfservicerepair.eu/en-GB/home
I always thought that website was a daughter company from Apple for liability reasons. Never knew it was a third party. TIL.
Is 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.
So basically they are trying to reach what Lenovo and others are doing for years.
Nice Apple. That's good :)
Thanks, 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-replac...
this is a re-arranged iPhone inside a larger case with a bigger battery no?
Just 20 steps and 18 screws to replace a battery, easy!
The guy in the linked video up thread tore the whole computer down in 6 minutes. I'm pretty sure most people can manage to find 12 minutes out of their life every 5 years to replace the battery if they want. But if that is too arduous, you can pay Apple to do it for you for a mere $149, with the battery included in that price. Given that a comparable battery from iFixit will cost you $80-$100, that's just ~$50 to have someone save you the hassle of having to remove 18 screws from your laptop every 5 years.
Bingo. People will go lengths to find a reason to complain about things they would otherwise never be actually bothered by in their lives.
But no adhesive under the battery. That’s huge.
Probably could get the battery directly without all the other disassembly steps...
Apple’s official illustrated guide shows you only need to pop the 8 case screws, 2 screws holding down the battery connector, then route the cables away and remove the 18 battery screws.
Not bad, not terrible?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/126157
The MacBook Neo has a rechargeable battery. By the time the battery goes bad from too many charge cycles people will want to upgrade to a newer one.
The Neo’s battery is rated for 1,000 charge cycles, same as the MBP.
Right, but his point is the battery last like 2-3x longer than most other similar laptops, so the charge cycles wear out 2-3x slower.
I mean, yes, it is easy. No adhesive and just a couple of clips on the case. You could replace the battery in 20 minutes with little anxiety that you're going to cause damage getting to it.
As 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.
And xray, microscope and soldering station to replace ssd.
I'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).
FYI: KWh (it is a product).
Yeah, that would be an interesting modification, wouldn’t it?
I'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.
I 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.
I'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.
Repairability 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).
Most laptops back then were filled with tons of screws.
Keyboard that doesn’t require half the computer to be thrown away to replace it!
That probably bit them HARD during the butterfly days.
Wow screws. Crazy. So the industry standard for many years. But I guess it's Different™ this time.
Yeah, 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.
> 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.
I'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.
Yes
Yes 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.
Not $3 trillion in revenue; a $3 trillion market cap.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/revenue
Over 11 years, they exceeded $3 trillion in revenue, actually. I knew it was a lot, hadn't actually looked at the totals before. 2015-2025 sums to $3.429 trillion.
They’ve gotten largely more repairable since then, including adhesives you can electrically debond.
That'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.
...electrically debond, are you serious? More details please, this sounds very interesting.
Video (use SponsorBlock): https://youtu.be/M6jBXI6CR9s?t=156
Article: https://www.ifixit.com/News/100352/we-hot-wired-the-iphone-1...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41623251