- A Reddit user manually upgraded his MacBook’s storage chips
- The process involved welding, 12 hours and “some nerves”
- The move saved them $2,200 after Apple recently raised prices.
How much is too much for laptop storage? After Apple’s shocking price hike, things might be so bad that you’ll be tempted to roll up your sleeves and do some emergency upgrade work on your MacBook. That’s exactly what one Apple fan did – and saved $2,200 in the process.
Posting on Reddit, user arduinoRPi4 explained how he took his MacBook Pro with 2TB of storage and boosted it up to 8TB, quadrupling his available storage with a serious upgrade that means it can “store anything I want.” They spent “around $800” on parts, saving them $2,200 (around £1,650 / AU$3,170), compared to the exorbitant $3,000 (around £2,240 / AU$4,320) it would have cost Apple for a similar upgrade.
Of course, being Apple, opening a MacBook Pro and increasing its storage yourself is far from simple. The post reveals that it took them 12 hours “and some nerves” to make the change – and no wonder, since it requires removing the existing storage modules from the MacBook Pro’s motherboard and soldering alternative chips in their place.
Additionally, the poster stated that they needed to “also fill in the electrical components on the other side” in order to complete the upgrade. “It was truly hell,” they admitted, adding that these pieces “are tiny packages.”
All the work was done while on vacation in Shenzhen, China, where they “borrowed a lab from a friend who does component-level repairs.” They used a hot air station, microscope soldering, and stencils to complete the job, which involved soldering power management ICs, followed by 4TB of NAND storage chips on each side of the laptop for a total of 8TB.
“It seems like a great job.”
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If you have the determination, patience and skills for laptop surgery like this, the savings can be huge. A 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max chip and 2TB of storage will cost you $4,099 / £4,099 / AU$6,399 at Apple’s increased prices. Change the storage to 8TB and that adjustment will add $3,000 to your bill, bringing the total to $7,099 / £7,099 / AU$10,899.
The difference is even more striking when you apply this change to Apple’s entry-level MacBook Pro. A 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 chip and 2TB of storage currently costs $2,499 / £2,499 / AU$3,949. Add 8TB of storage and the total increases by a whopping $4,600. This is partly due to the expensive addition of storage and partly because it requires replacing the M5 chip with an M5 Max, which is the only chip that can be configured with 8TB of storage.
A $3,000 upgrade is well out of reach for most MacBook buyers (let alone a $4,600 upgrade), so it’s perhaps not surprising that an enterprising user with plenty of experience and a little free time would feel motivated to manually upgrade their storage.
Most of the posters in the thread were very impressed with their work, with comments such as “very impressive, I could never” being typical. One user was particularly effusive in their praise, saying: “This kind of work blows my mind. »
That said, other users were not at all happy that a task like this was necessary. “It’s crazy that you have to go to this level of modification just to upgrade your storage,” one said, indicating that Apple’s increase in storage prices isn’t exactly the most popular decision ever.
But with the rush toward artificial intelligence (AI) driving up component prices around the world and Apple unwilling to compromise its notoriously high margins, rising costs are here to stay, at least for now. And even if that’s still the case, there will likely be many more people willing to take on the daunting task of upgrading their laptop’s storage with a few off-the-shelf components and a soldering iron on hand.
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