MacBook Neo는 14년 만에 가장 수리하기 쉬운 MacBook입니다

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. A Flat Disassembly Tree: Our Favorite Kind 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. No Parts Pairing Issues with Original Parts 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! A Screwed-Down Battery in a MacBook? OMG YES FINALLY 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