News Repair shop offers 2TB SSD upgrades for M1, M2 Macbook Air — solders on bigger flash chips

[Admin]

Vancouver Mac Service Centre offers a MacBook M1 SSD upgrade service.

Repair shop offers 2TB SSD upgrades for M1, M2 Macbook Air — solders on bigger flash chips : Read more

 

[peachpuff]

Software update from Apple coming soon to brick any device with unauthorized ssd chips...

 

[brandonjclark]

I just watched that entire thing.

How much do they want for that work order?

Looks intensive.

 

[usertests]

"Thankfully, due to advanced soldering techniques, it is now possible to upgrade the storage space of the newest MacBooks to their highest configuration..."

Does the industry have newer, better soldering techniques?

Software update from Apple coming soon to brick any device with unauthorized ssd chips...

How about a nice class action lawsuit for Apple

 

[watzupken]

Tim Cook must be fuming or crying now. If the technique starts becoming common, they can kiss goodbye to overcharging their customers for upgrades. At least there is an alternative to upgrade out of warranty than having to pay for costly upgrades at the onsite.

 

[spongiemaster]

Tim Cook must be fuming or crying now. If the technique starts becoming common, they can kiss goodbye to overcharging their customers for upgrades. At least there is an alternative to upgrade out of warranty than having to pay for costly upgrades at the onsite.

Doubt it. How much demand do you really think there is for something like this? Even as an enthusiast, I would never even consider using such a service.

 

[cyrusfox]

Software update from Apple coming soon to brick any device with unauthorized ssd chips...

This would be my fear, once they start serializing configurations to the bootloader, they really could shut this down and maybe they already have a roadmap to it, but I would think old configurations are safe, but who knows...

 

[baboma]

>How much do they want for that work order?

From the updated article, CDN550 ($407) for 2TB upgrade, which is reasonable considering the labor involved.

>Looks intensive.

I think the YouTube demo was exaggerated, to lay claim to how meticuluous the upgrade process is (read: worth your money). In reality, the re-tinning process only need to be done once, not multiple times.

With practice, the 2 NAND chips shown in the demo can be removed, and new ones installed, in ~10 min. The tricky part of course is to have the necessary software to update the Apple middleware and validate the upgrade.


>"Thankfully, due to advanced soldering techniques, it is now possible to upgrade the storage space of the newest MacBooks to their highest configuration..."

>Does the industry have newer, better soldering techniques?

SMT de/soldering isn't anything new. All you need is a hot air soldering station, available on Amazon for ~$135. That's what they used in the demo.


>If the technique starts becoming common, they can kiss goodbye to overcharging their customers for upgrades. At least there is an alternative to upgrade out of warranty than having to pay for costly upgrades at the onsite.

As said, SMT soldering isn't new. The bottleneck is the validation software. My impression is that said upgrade co is a tiny outfit, which probably means they didn't reverse-engineer Apple's validation app, but likely "borrowed" the tech from somewhere, possibly an ex-employee. The point is that you aren't likely to see this being offered by other repair outfits.