Upgrading Apple Silicon Soldered SSDs

You are quite literally The Greatest Technician That's Ever Lived. Every new video blows my mind. Keep up this awesome work.

It's awful realizing that this is what you need to do to simply upgrade or replace a broken drive, but simultaneously, it's pretty amazing to see. Thanks.

I love how many times you've said, "All we need to do..." There is no way I would ever consider any of these steps as an "all you need to do" event. LOL!

Apple: We want to be more sustainable as a company Also Apple: Lets make machines with 128gb of disk.

I love the mad scientist energy of nonchalantly using a Frankenstein G4 iMac/M1 Mac Mini because it's the closest Mac at hand.

As someone who has dabbled in far less sophisticated soldering adventures - this was a complete and utter slap in the face, you made that look so trivial and easy that I want to throw out all my soldering gear and take up gardening. Breathtaking from start to finish - a true master displaying his craft. For most people removing bga chips is already risky and error prone, you just did it x4 and x2 of those times were just to show us that it wasn't going to work! plus 40 tiny SMD components?? Black. Effin. Magic.

It is criminal that you have to do this to upgrade/repair storage on M series macs, but I love that you're showing how to do it! Your Catalina patcher kept 2 of my old macs going for ungodly amounts of time too hahah

You really are more innovative than Apple claims to be. Much respect to you.

I can't believe I watched this whole video, but for some reason I couldn't stop.

I absolutely loathe resistor work on machines with not populated pads. Hats off to a pretty neat resistor work! Looking forward to 315 upgrades!

Great work! If only Apple or their authorized resellers were that adept. My local authorized reseller wasn't even able to diagnose why my MacBook Air didn't turn on and just claimed it was a water damage.

The skill you possess to make this happen is incredible. The fact that this level of skill is necessary to replace the single component most likely to fail should, I think, be criminal globally.

Dear Collin, You have just made my day, my week, and my year. It IS UNDERSTANDABLE, I get why people say "it is soldered in - impossible to upgrade the storage" on this machine. And talking to myself, I go "well, exactly, how do they do it at the manufacturing plant where these computers are made?". Thank you so much. Challenging . . . yes, Difficult . . . yes. But possible? Definitely. You have definitely shown that, with the right tools, skills, schematics, etc., that even the latest, most modern computers . . . can move beyond 128GB. Lovely, lovely, video. Thank you so much. John M. 😄👍

Hey dosdude! I can confirm that the 128 gig configuration of the M1 Air is real, as my school gives them to the students (I'm typing this comment on it now). I can also confirm that 128 gigs of storage (115 usable, not including preboot, vm, macos, "system data", and school bloatware) is way worse than it even sounds. Ever since my first year of owning this computer, I have been CONSTANTLY running out of storage. It really has infuriated me to no end, especially with MacOS' beyond terrible storage management. It has been a massive headache, and the worst part is that the school made this decision, despite my parents completely paying for the computer (and they would be more than willing to pay a bit more for me to have gotten an actually usable storage configuration, but because they're soldered, there's nothing we can do). Thanks for sticking it to Apple one soldered SSD at a time! Edit: I also forgot to mention that using BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, the speed of the SSD is halved, so it has only about 1500 megabyte per second for read and write, instead of the normal M1 3000

Hands down the most interesting and detailed SMD video on Apple products. There are 2 areas where you got extremely lucky with this project. First, the single Nand board came with all internal traces and Via's intact to power and operate both installed chips. Second, Bios on the board was not locked down to prevent hardware "upgrades" even in this extreme use case. Kudos to you and your craftsmanship

I wanted to give this a try for a while now, and I decided to try it today. Everything went very smooth, and it worked out of the gate. Thank you for the guide. I feel slightly less a beginner in microsoldering now :)

I don't know why but everytime I hear "Alright" or "As you can see here" give me so much vibe. Really satisfying.

gotta applaud the effort it took to make this video, from not only showing the entire soldering process to desoldering the chips and programming them, must have taken a lot of time and hard work. You're amazing at what you do

Here I am dreading a recap of my SE/30, and you are doing this level of work. You are a god among mere mortals.

Great to watch, your skillset & knowledge levels are massive bud. There's no way I or most normal folks could do this, kudos again, absolutely awesome.