While it is true that MacBook Pros equipped with M3 Max processors are the fastest laptops in the company’s history, in recent months there have been interesting debates about the opposite, the lack of power and solvency.
Complaints about an iMac 24” M3 with just a base M3 chip and computers with only 8 GB of RAM and above-market prices clearly show that Apple users are accustomed to the best, but not at any price. And Apple is very prone to additional costs when someone searches for a few additional gigabytesso someone looked for an alternative to enjoy the best of Apple Silicon and the best without paying a fortune by extending the solid disk.
An 8TB MacBook Pro for the price of 1TB?
The 16-inch MacBook Pro equipped with the Apple M3 Max SoC comes with 1TB of storage. Increasing the SSD soldered to the card is not cheap: in USA, simply going from 1 to 2 TB of capacity involves a huge additional expense, with 460 dollars of additional cost – when the fourth generation M.2 NVMe rarely exceeds the 200 dollars -. Adding 8 TB means increasing the final price by no less than 2,530 dollarsas we can see in the following image:
A huge expense, considering you can get an 8TB external SSD for around 700 dollars. Thus, the user of @lipilipsi He decided to save a fortune by gutting his equipment and modifying it. Something that completely breaks the official product warranty and requires considerable expertise, but was no problem for this ICC engineer.
To do this, he had to follow several processes. The first, unsolders the memory chips to extract them and replace them with those he had acquired. In the images he provided through his profile we can see how the user reuse and take advantage of connections to increase the storage capacity of their MacBook Pro.
But of course, no matter your welding skills, The device is preconfigured to only recognize 1TB of storage. Of course, not all memory chips are compatible, so it seems he also had to tinker in the BIOS to change the controls and finally get the system to read and validate that 8TB without any hindrance.
This user of Chinese nationality did not provide more information about the process nor did he respond to requests for additional information from users of the social network. He doesn’t even reveal the cost of the flash memories he used as substitutes. In any case, he attaches photos of the final result and he has contributed over time several videos with exhaustive monitoring of the process on other computers, in particular on an M1 MacBook Pro making the same jump from 1TB SSD to 8TB. And this process, which is said to be easy, is not.
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