SAN FRANCISCO, March 13 (Reuters) - Apple's ( AAPL )

MacBook Neo, the laptop it announced last week that starts at

$499 for students, is the most repairable laptop the company has

released since 2014, according to an analysis released Friday by

iFixit.

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 ( DELL ) and Lenovo Group ( LNVGF ) have used those ratings to

improve the repairability of their products.

In the teardown published on Friday, iFixit found that Apple ( AAPL )

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.

Apple ( AAPL ) 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.

But Apple's ( AAPL ) 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 ( AAPL ), which has prioritized thinner and lighter devices

over the past decade, has made its products harder to repair.

Apple ( AAPL ) did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wiens said one of the reasons is that MacBook Neo's 8

gigabytes of DRAM memory are directly soldered to the circuit

board of the machine, which is similar to all of Apple's ( AAPL ) Mac

designs in recent years but will make MacBook Neos impossible to

easily upgrade with more memory.

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 ( AAPL ) has publicly cited

the privacy benefits of running those applications on a laptop

instead of in the cloud. He said Apple ( AAPL ) could improve its

offerings by including an additional layer of memory chips that

users can upgrade.

"Apple's ( AAPL ) future for privacy-centered AI has to be local

models," Wiens said. "I would argue this is a flaw across

Apple's ( AAPL ) entire Mac product line."