Chinese engineers cracked Apple's M1 chip and successfully upgrade RAM and SSD | Hacker News Reader

Chinese engineers cracked Apple's M1 chip and successfully upgrade RAM and SSD

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99 pointsquyleanh46 comments

There's not much evidence that any upgrade actually happened. The photo show someone has managed to desolder the RAM & SSD chips, which isn't really news.

Also, looks like they only upgrade the 8GB/256SSD to 16G/1TB SSD, which is a supported configuration, so at best this is someone skilled at soldering BGA parts.

I'd be more interested if someone had managed to get 32GB RAM working.

> so at best this is someone skilled at soldering BGA parts.

It is, but I am afraid the next thing Apple will do now would be to DRM the memory chips.

> I'd be more interested if someone had managed to get 32GB RAM working.

I believe there is no 16GB LPDDR4 on the market at the moment.

> It is, but I am afraid the next thing Apple will do now would be to DRM the memory chips.

They already do that(check the other article on the frontpage), but at they moment, they still give you software to re-DRM it :)

> It is, but I am afraid the next thing Apple will do now would > be to DRM the memory chips.

Why "afraid"? I hope you are not considering resoldering BGA chips on tightly integrated machine a viable upgrade path?

Maybe not GP directly, but this could be a possibility for an "upgrade as a service".

I have no idea what the cost of desoldering and resoldering the modules is, but given Apple's markup on RAM and SSD, it might make it worthwhile, just as there are many shops doing repairs on iPhones.

I've thought of this myself. As devices get more integrated, it could be worth having a professional with the right tools and machinery to upgrade laptops/phone/tablets by unsoldering and re-soldering in new modules.

Upgrade your RAM for cheaper, replace NAND Flash modules near their write capacity or slowing down with fresh ones, breathing new life into a device...

There might be a market for it, also it would be an eco friendly way of upgrading old devices so they remain usable instead of throwing them away and creating more e-waste

The market is already fairly flooded with the lowest spec models, while the higher-spec ones are more sought after - for a new device each upgrade step costs 300€.

What do the chips and BGA soldering labor cost?

You'd be surprised what chinese smart phone repair shops in Shenzen can do with tiny parts. Soldering Macbook BGA parts will be trivial in comparison. I don't think there is a western equivalent to this though.

What I find outrageous is that consumers accept the fact that their expensive new Mac has become a non upgradable black box. Apparently, years of exposure to the dependency from tight closed cellphones did the job. Long gone are the days of the Apple II; I still recall it being labeled as the best possible home computer for being so open to expansion and tinkering.

How people expect to, at the same time,

having thin, light, fanless laptop, and it being fully upgradeable with replaceable parts

i think the people who want that are either delusional, or are just not the target audience

looking at the sales, it's probably only just people who like to complain at Apple for doing what they can't do

the connectors for storage and ram can be very low profile. There is no reason any sane layout with connectors would add to the thickness. Its especially egregious storage is a soldered device. Not just from an upgrade standpoint but data recovery point of view.

If some other part fails and basically makes the device a brick there is now no easy way to recover the data.

I've got this old HP-42s calculator here in front of me, which has no viable upgrade path, and adjusted for inflation it was more expensive than an entry level M1.

I have an HP-67 and an HP-97 as well, neither of which has any upgrade path and they each cost half as much as a new economy car when they came out.

They were different products for different tasks, and the fact that they can still be used after decades shows how much they're different from a computer, particularly a modern computer. Today not being able to upgrade the RAM or storage, or having a non replaceable battery can mean halving the life of a product, which in today figures would not be like 15 years instead of 30 but rather 2.5 instead of 5.

I still use an over ten year old Thinkpad as my daily driver. It’s not as dire as all that.

My X240 isn't yet 10 years old, but as of today is among the fastest machines in my house: It literally flies with Debian+XFCE. It's remarkable how long hardware can last if we ditch bloated software.

Is this a machine translation? It’s really hard to follow some parts. The site is full of clickbait ads and no real info

I think it might be translated by Google Translator. I noticed that

> Think about the official upgrade of 8GB of memory to 16GB, you need 1500 soft sister coins.

"soft sister coins" seems to be RMB (人民币). When I put those Chinese characters into Google Translator, it gives me the phrase "soft sister coin".

I was particularly amused by this line:

> Think about the official upgrade of 8GB of memory to 16GB, you need 1500 soft sister coins.

You can get a recycled 512gb iPhone NAND for ~50USD.

You might have to copy the original SYSCFG (containing stuff like mac addresses, calibration, etc) to one of the new NANDs using something like http://www.jcidtech.com/product/product-86-806.html

All the iDevices (including laptops since at least T1) use the same NAND packages. Pre-iPhone 8 / T2 devices use a BGA60 package, while NANDs in devices after that use a BGA110 package.

For example, the NAND chip found in the iFixit teardown of the 2019 16 inch (TSB4227) is explicitly listed as supported by the programmer linked above: https://i.imgur.com/06a0KEg.jpg

The click bait and advertising in that "news" website is pure cancer

I left immediately when it showed a fake ‘update your VPN’ iOS system notification. Didn’t even get to read the article.

Actually this news is still not confirmed well. There are less tech sites talk about that. And since I use ads blocker, I have no problem with that.

that was the odd thing, I use two ad blockers so was surprised to see such an obvious fake ‘VPN notification’ that I knew it was an ad or malware.

> Chinese engineers cracked ...

I feel this is becoming the new "British scientists ..." meme

In Turkey, the national meme is (for unknown reasons) "Scottish scientists...".

Scottish? I always hear Switzerlandish.

aka "Swiss" ;)

That too. Those words sound similar when translated after all.

Chinese engineers crack iPhone used by Florida Man

Original link: https://www.chongdiantou.com/wp/archives/73084.html

There's a video of a western guy living in China learning to desolder Flash memory chips from an iPhone and then solder higher capacity chips in their place from back in 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHP-OPXK2ig

Being in Shenzhen China, he was able to buy the needed tools and many broken boards to practice on, and eventually managed to do it on a live board himself.

So is it just a matter of soldering a new chip on?

Or do you also need to flash on hacked firmware?

> But now someone has cracked the M1 chip, which means that you can upgrade the memory even if you don't pass the official Apple.

I'm not sure exactly whats happening with this translation or how the M1 was 'cracked' maybe they mean physically ?

I really think they mean physically.

It looks like they've dremmelled off the heatspreader, so I think I'd agree with that - cracked like a nut.

And this remind us the future of Apple Desktop Personal Computing with No upgrade or serviceable parts. Along with insane Mark Up of RAM and Storage.

The only good thing is the possibility of a 12" MacBook Air at $799 in the near future.

Macs didn't have any user-upgradeable parts since 2016..

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191

Isn't "iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020)" actually the current release version you can buy from the Apple Store?

iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pro all have upgradable Memory slot.

Actually this news is still not confirmed well since there is no evidence. However with all these customized iDevices things from Shenzhen guys, I think it's likely true. Wait for further investigation.

But can you add 32GB ram? Then I'm interested...!

I think, starting in May, Chinese engineers will be ready to upgrade the M1 to M1X for you for a separate fee and 3 months before the start of official sales. :)

The pedantic in me will just obsess over the fact that the CPU cover plate is now cut in half and it will now affect heat dissipation and cause crashes.

A little more details on how would be nice.

What kind of details? It's all pictured really - find the memory or storage chips, replace the chips. It's difficult/impossible without specialised tools, but nice that the OS accepts this modification without throwing a wobbly.

Its generally a little more than removing the chips with a hot air rework station, and soldering larger ones. I am sure the sizes of the RAM and flash chips is also set in firmware on the main SoC. You would also have to update those values in firmware.

Apple's macOS hotfix patch for security reasons incoming in 4... 3... 2... 1...

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