Is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever also one of its most repairable? For years, opening a MacBook has usually meant fighting your way through glue and buried parts.

But the Neo stands out, with increasingly good day-one manuals, less-painful keyboard repairs, and a screwed-in battery tray that sent cheers across the iFixit office. This laptop proves that things can be made more affordable and more repairable at the same time. 

That said, there are some compromises here. Some reviewers say the speakers don’t meet the usual MacBook standard. The laptop is built on an A18 Pro, a mobile chip first seen in the iPhone 16 Pro, which limits the machine to 8 GB of RAM. Storage comes in 256 or 512 GB, and whichever one you buy is the one you keep.

We didn’t need to open the machine to guess that RAM and storage would be soldered. But of course we opened it anyway.

Let’s dig into the most repairable MacBook since Gangnam Style was topping the charts.

There are still eight pentalobe screws on the underside, which is annoying. Maybe one day Macs will go full team Torx Plus. But, pentalobes out, and the lower case can be unclipped by hand. No heat, no opening pick, no suction handle, no careful prying around the perimeter. Inside, our new friend Neo makes a very strong first impression. 

When we score repairability, one of the main things we’re looking at is the disassembly tree, a simplified map of how a device comes apart: We want it flat, with as few components in the way of others as possible. Immediately upon removing the back case of the Neo, we were impressed. This tree is more acacia than monkeypod.

The battery connector is front and center, and the layout is unusually sensible by MacBook standards. The battery, speakers, USB-C ports, and even the trackpad are all easy to get to, with the rest being only a few screws away. 

Another huge win: We haven’t found any parts pairing issues.

If you’ve been following iFixit, you know we’ve railed hard against the software barrier to repair known as parts pairing. For anyone new to the fight, the gist is that for many years, Apple and other manufacturers were locking parts, using tiny microcontrollers to link them to a specific device. Then, if a part was moved or replaced, the device would automatically limit certain features and send you discouraging warnings, sometimes under the guise of OEM-only calibration. After an iPhone battery replacement, for instance, you wouldn’t be able to see your battery health, and you’d get “unauthorized part” warnings that scared a lot of people away.

But we fought hard, and a bill passed in Oregon in 2024 that finally banned these parts pairing repair restrictions. Afterward, Apple introduced a software tool called Repair Assistant that made it possible for consumers and independent shops to complete part calibration themselves. In September 2025, Apple brought Repair Assistant to MacBooks running macOS Tahoe. Awesome.

We usually test for parts pairing by swapping a logic board from one device into another. This typically triggers “new part,” “used part,” or “unknown part” warnings for everything that’s paired, mimicking replacing a bunch of parts at once. In our testing, Repair Assistant accepted replacement parts without complaint, specifically screen and battery. 

We even threw some challenges its way: Would the software balk at new biometrics? Nope, we swapped Touch ID modules between two Neos, and calibration went just fine. It actually went better than ever before. When we swapped displays, the webcam activation green dot appeared even before starting Repair Assistant calibration.

To be clear, we haven’t done any testing with third-party parts yet, not that they even exist. And Apple still hasn’t solved the problem of Activation Lock: Refurbishers often end up with piles of working MacBooks that the owners haven’t released from their iCloud accounts. It’s a shame that so much good hardware ends up dumped, and we keep calling on Apple to find a solution.

Parts pairing problems with OEM parts, though, Apple seems to have solved. Good riddance!

The battery is the big story here. Older MacBook batteries have usually been glued in place, which makes a normal wear repair harder, riskier, and more expensive than it needs to be. 

Even our most experienced teardowners rarely managed to get all 14 stretch-release adhesive strips out intact from under the old style of MacBook battery. And the older the strips are, the more fragile they become. When a strip snaps, you have to break out the adhesive remover, finagle it to spread under the battery, and then cross your fingers and pry. Gently, of course. Prying too hard at a charged battery could short it and start a fire. Even the last instance of a battery tray, the M1 MacBook Air that this Neo is semi-replacing, had stretch release strips in addition to its screws.

The Neo’s battery, by contrast, sits on a tray and comes out with screws. Eighteen of them, to be exact. That’s a lot (and probably for good reason–more on that later), but screws still beat adhesive every time. You remove them, lift the battery out, and move on.

That may sound like a small thing. It’s not. Battery replacement on the Neo feels ordinary in a way MacBook battery replacement has not for a very long time. The pack itself is made of two cells rated for a combined 36.48 Wh, and replacing it no longer feels like a delicate extraction job.

It’s also hard not to see this as Apple preparing for the new EU Batteries Regulation. By mid-2027, portable products sold there will need user-replaceable batteries. The Neo seems to be where Apple is testing its answer: screws instead of glue.

What about those 18 screws? The battery tray is probably doubling as extra chassis rigidity: it’s perfectly placed underneath the keyboard (a section of the top case that’s naturally less rigid due to less material) and the tray has a full length stamped rib to keep it stiff. This, paired with eighteen screws, and you have a helpful structural member. Maybe they could’ve used sixteen… no, that’s pushing it.

We also noticed something else unusual while we were inside. Apple now lists all the screw types used in the device: Torx Plus (IP, or “internal plus”) 8, 5, 3, and 1.

This isn’t required by any EU regulation, as far as we know. But it’s a big deal for recycling. Recyclers have to start by manual disassembly, separating out plastic and metal components. They’ve usually got an assembly line of people with screwdrivers. One report of engine disassembly found that more than half the time (54%) was just loosening screws, and our repairability engineers can confirm it’s similar for electronics. If those screwdriver-wielding recyclers have to waste time also hunting for screws, the cost of recycling can quickly outweigh the value of material recovered.

For repair, it’s just nice. You can get out all the drivers and bits you need before you start. However, funnily enough, we noticed Torx Plus 6 is also used, albeit in a place not required for disassembly. The screws that hold the spring boards to the trackpad module are IP6.

Speaking of spending a lot of time loosening screws, we’re excited to see a keyboard that’s not riveted to the top case or attached to a battery. The keyboard still is not easy to replace here. You still have to peel tape, clean adhesive, and remove 41 (yes, forty-one) screws. 

This method of attachment is common on modern Macs, but the job starts from a much better place because you’re not also dealing with a glued-in battery before you can even begin. It’s still tedious, but no longer absurd.

And Apple has finally gotten officially on board with the idea of keyboard replacement without changing out the whole top case: They’ve got a repair manual that describes how to swap out a keyboard, and their separate keyboard shield guide makes it seem like they’re planning to sell both as independent products via their Self Service Repair store. Our fingers are once again crossed.

To be clear, this keyboard is better than in MacBooks of yore, but we know it’s got quite a bit of room for improvement. For some quick perspective: Lenovo just released the ThinkPad T14 Gen 7, with nearly tool-free keyboard removal that helped earn it a 10/10 repairability score. We thought about that with every… single… one… of those 41 screws. And, while we’re making comparisons, replacing its battery is just as easy. Oh, and it has modular storage… and modular RAM! OK, nevermind. We digress.

Apple is clearly trying to position this laptop squarely in the education market. As such, Neo keyboards can expect to see a fair bit of juice (or wine, depending on the age range of said education market).

At $499 for schools and $599 for everyone else, the Neo is aimed at the same broad space currently dominated by Chromebooks, which are used in 93% of American K-12 schools. Students in the Oakland repair internship program fix thousands of Chromebooks per year, and their feedback about which devices have replaceable screens, batteries, and keyboards feed back into purchasing decisions. School IT departments are paying attention to what can be fixed.

By making the Neo fixable, Apple stands to take a slice of the Chromebook education pie. And where it isn’t replacing a Chromebook, it’s now arguably king of the $500 laptop hill.

The Neo has the same modular bits and bobs we’ve applauded in recent MacBook designs. The USB-C ports are modular, so a damaged charge port doesn’t turn into logic board work.

The newly-relocated headphone jack is modular too, which is how it should be. We breathed a sigh of relief to still see that 3.5mm port, by the way. CNN says wired headphones are making a comeback in 2026, but in our office, they never left. Plus, in classic Apple fashion, both the USB-C ports and headphone jack are color matched to each model.

The display is also easier to remove than on recent MacBooks because the antenna assembly is finally straightforward. Once that and the four hinge screws are out, the screen comes away without the usual MacBook fiddliness. That’s a meaningful shift. 

Once the cowlings and flex cables are out of the way, the board lifts cleanly. But RAM and storage are soldered, with memory integrated into the A18 Pro package. Apple gets cost savings, scalability, a compact board, and the performance benefits that come with it. You get a machine that cannot grow with your needs and cannot easily give up its data if the board fails.

That tradeoff is not new, and we have criticized it as recently as earlier this week. The Neo just brings the same compromise to a cheap MacBook. Whatever storage and memory you buy on day one is what you live with for the life of the machine.

The A18 Pro package appears to be the same as in the iPhone 16 Pro, but that doesn’t rule out minor architectural differences. We’d need to swap an actual iPhone chip in to try it out. Either way, the Neo is obviously more “iPhone silicon in a laptop” than a cut-down MacBook Air. Put the Neo board next to a MacBook Air M3 board and the difference is obvious.

Then there’s the trackpad.

The Neo uses a mechanical trackpad, making it the first MacBook since 2015 to drop Force Touch. Apple spent the last decade treating haptic trackpads as the settled way to do things, so this is a surprising reversal.

The mechanism is simple, but still magic. Two flexures let the trackpad move, and a central screw sets how much force it takes to actuate the membrane switch underneath. It’s easier to understand than Force Touch, easier to access, and almost certainly cheaper to produce.

The speakers tell a similar story. They’re easy to remove, but by all reports are not as good as the speakers in pricier MacBooks. Their side-firing design likely saves Apple some machining and some money. If you were wondering where Apple saved a few dollars to hit Chromebook territory, this is one place to look.

We were all a bit curious as to why the cheaper and less feature rich Neo weighed the same as a MacBook Air M3, each 13” laptop weighing in at about 1.24kg. It’s especially puzzling when considering the Neo supposedly uses a lighter chassis, and is, uh, smaller. 

Here’s what we found: The Neo’s chassis is actually only barely lighter than the Air’s. Together, its chassis, keyboard, and bottom cover are just 8g lighter than the Air’s. But the Neo’s screen is 48g heavier, and the solid chunk of metal that supports its trackpad makes up 7% of the laptop’s overall weight! The Neo’s full trackpad assembly is almost exactly twice as heavy as the M3 MacBook Air’s, too.  

Maybe the Air really is Air after all. 

So where does that leave the Neo?

It still has Apple’s usual long-term ownership problems. Soldered RAM and storage are bad for longevity, even with Apple’s great memory management. The keyboard repair still takes far too much work. Pentalobe screws on the bottom case are still unnecessary.

But the parts that fail first are easier to reach than they have been on any MacBook in a long time. The battery is screwed down instead of glued in. The ports are modular. The display is easier to replace. The internal layout is unusually sensible. Apple’s manuals are available on day one. The software side did not sabotage the hardware side. It comes in cool colors.

That’s enough for a 6 out of 10 on our repairability scale. By MacBook standards, this is a strong score. It also makes the Neo the most repairable MacBook we’ve seen in about fourteen years.

For Apple laptop repair, that counts as a real comeback.