Lately, techniques to increase computer storage (notably the new Mac Mini M4) and thus circumvent Apple's prohibitive prices They are on the agenda. It seems that users are becoming emboldened to do something they would never have considered before: opening a new computer to modify it as they wish. Something that voids the official warranty but provides improvements in storage and speed.
Complaints about computers with just 8GB of RAM have been heard by Apple and the mandatory 16GB has already been imposed on laptops and desktops. And 12GB on phones like the iPhone 17 Air, judging by the latest leaks. Maybe not for the right reasons, because we owe everything to Apple Intelligence, but at least Apple took the plunge and It did this without increasing the cost of its products.
An 8TB MacBook Pro for the price of 1TB?
The reality is that Apple users are used to the best, but not at any price. And Apple is very prone to additional costs when someone searches for a few extra 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.
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. The price is the same for the MacBook Pro 16'' with M4 Pro and M4 Max chip.
Now imagine you are a musician working with hundreds of gigabytes of libraries for VST (virtual instruments) or editing videos and exporting the raw videos in 8K. You need space, lots of space. To give us an idea, 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 decides to spare himself this pasture, emptying 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 with the BIOS to change the controls and finally get the system to read and validate that 8TB without any hindrance.
In fact, the same process is followed by another user who converted his 256GB Mac Mini M4 to a 2TB Mac Mini. Of course, the popular KingSener makes something look easy and even requires some to have have an ultraviolet sterilizer at home. In just 10 minutes, it condenses at least an hour of work.
Coming back to the MacBook M3 Pro Max, the Chinese user did not provide more information about the process or respond to requests for further information on social media. He doesn't even reveal the cost of the flash memories he used as replacements.
In any case, he attaches photos of the final result and he has contributed over time several videos with comprehensive monitoring of the process on other computers, especially on a MacBook Pro M1 make the same jump from 1TB SSD to 8TB. And this process, which we say is easy, is not.
Recently, the iFixit team also took apart the new MacBook Pro M4 and found that the equipment is essentially identical. SO the same process could be done to increase memory by following the same steps. We repeat: you lose the official guarantee. But you gain a lot of storage for very little.
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