A Friendly Wager on the Future of Repairability and Performance ⇥ dithering.passport.online

On a recent episode of “Dithering”, Ben Thompson and John Gruber discuss the Tech Re-Nu teardown of the MacBook Neo and what it reveals about the supposed trade-offs of repairability. Thompson says at about 5:48 into the paywalled episode:

The MacBook Neo is a perfect counterpoint to the iFixit perspective. It’s like: you can get repairability, but what it’s going to cost you is a less capable computer with lower battery life.

And that’s fine. We’re at the stage where these iPhone chips are so good — it’s still a very good computer. But it’s quite handy to have the MacBook Air next to the MacBook Neo. They weigh the same. One has much more performance than the other, and that’s the price.

To summarize: “the price”, it is implied, is that the MacBook Air must be less repairable for it to have good battery life and better performance.

I am less certain. You can complain as I did about the adhesive-attached batteries and unrepairable keyboards in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but the most recent updates are effectively speed increases with few other changes. If Apple would like to bring the same repairability advantages of the Neo to the Air and the Pro, it would do so when it redesigns those computers.¹ And I think Apple could bring at least some of those repairability improvements — battery or keyboard, perhaps? — to those products in the next major hardware revision.

Call this a friendly wager which I will only be making in internet points. Also, this might be wishcasting — but I think this is the way the winds are blowing. My impression of Apple’s approach to repairability is that it was not a high priority for a long time — particularly for products nearer the beginning of their development cycle — and that it argued for trade-offs that were ultimately irrelevant. That is not only Apple’s approach; there are plenty of companies with poor track records on this stuff. But a patchwork of right-to-repair legislation around the world is helping make devices easier to fix. Also, if assembly costs are indeed reduced by using screws instead of glue — something I am skeptical of but which Thompson and Gruber posit — surely Apple would want to do the same in other products.