By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO, March 13 (Reuters) - Apple's MacBook Neo, the laptop it announced last week that starts at $499 for students, is the most repairable laptop the company has released
Apple MacBook Neo emerges as company's most repairable laptop in more than a decade
(Corrects year of last repairable MacBook in first paragraph)
By Stephen Nellis
iFixit analysis highlights MacBook Neo's repairability improvements
SAN FRANCISCO, March 13 (Reuters) - Apple's MacBook Neo, the laptop it announced last week that starts at $499 for students, is the most repairable laptop the company has released since 2012, according to an analysis released Friday by iFixit.
iFixit's role in repairability ratings
iFixit publishes repair guides and sells parts and tools for consumer electronic devices, but also provides ratings for how easy items are to fix and keep running. Laptop makers such as Dell Tech and Lenovo Group have used those ratings to improve the repairability of their products.
Key changes in MacBook Neo design
Improvements in battery and keyboard attachment
In the teardown published on Friday, iFixit found that Apple had made key changes from previous laptops, such as attaching the computer's batteries and keyboard with screws rather than glue or rivets, and making it easy to swap out parts such as the device's camera and fingerprint sensor.
Targeting the education market
Apple is widely believed to be targeting the same education markets with its MacBook Neo that Google targets with its low-cost Chromebooks. Kyle Wiens, iFixit's chief executive, said Chromebooks are frequently repaired, with some school districts such as those in Oakland, California even tapping student interns to fix them.
Repairability score and industry comparison
But Apple's MacBook Neo still scored only a 6 out of 10 on iFixit's scale, where other machines such as a recent Lenovo ThinkPad have scored 9s and 10s.
Apple's design priorities and repair challenges
Apple, which has prioritized thinner and lighter devices over the past decade, has made its products harder to repair.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Limitations due to soldered memory
Impact on upgradability and AI applications
Wiens said one of the reasons is that MacBook Neo's 8 gigabytes of DRAM are directly soldered to the circuit board of the machine as part of a package with the machine's main processing chip, which is similar to all of Apple's Mac designs in recent years but will make MacBook Neos impossible to easily upgrade with more memory.
Potential issues for future AI workloads
Wiens said that could make it hard for the MacBook Neo to run artificial intelligence applications as they grow in complexity in the coming years, even as Apple has publicly cited the privacy benefits of running those applications on a laptop instead of in the cloud. He said Apple could improve its offerings by including an additional layer of memory chips that users can upgrade.
"Apple's future for privacy-centered AI has to be local models," Wiens said. "I would argue this is a flaw across Apple's entire Mac product line."
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Diane Craft)
