Apple appears to have prematurely revealed the name of its rumored lower-cost MacBook model, which is expected to be announced this Wednesday. A regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has appeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further details or images available yet. While the PDF file does not contain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on Apple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes.
That chassis hasn’t been for sale for 4 years, so judge repairability on what they sell now. And regardless of sourcing it from Apple or not, you can easily source the battery.
Yap, newer models use those strips, my bad. Although, I disagree the inability to source stuff from the manufacturer isn’t a big deal: batteries made of chinesium tend to fail really quickly, up to the point I started replacing just the cells myself with known good quality ones after a couple of batteries failing in like half a year. However, I suspect apple should sell batteries for said newer models, since they’ve made 'em replaceable.