Apple’s laptops used to be designed for repairability, and it showed. The solutions were smart, fun, and sometimes beautiful.

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Apple's laptops once featured thoughtful repairability design — removable keyboards, user-swappable batteries, accessible RAM and storage hatches. Early iBooks and PowerBooks let users replace most components with just a screwdriver. Today's MacBooks, including the 2026 MacBook Neo with only an 8GB RAM option, are nearly impossible to upgrade or repair. The post contrasts these historical designs with modern glued, soldered construction, notes that technologies like LPCAMM2 could enable modular RAM without sacrificing performance, and argues Apple's abandonment of repairability is a deliberate choice rather than a technical necessity.

Macbook Neo Shows how far Apple’s repairability design has fallen