iPhone 16 Pro Storage Expansion 128GB to 1TB [video] | Hacker News Reader

iPhone 16 Pro Storage Expansion 128GB to 1TB [video]

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403 pointshaunter293 comments

Putting aside all the business model stuff, man, Apple makes some seriously pretty hardware. The packing, the cables and connectors, the wrapped motherboard - the whole thing is gorgeous.

The design of the iPhone has always fascinated me. It's just so... clean.

Apple has always made even the insides of their hardware clean and neatly laid out, dating back to the Original mac hardware. In the video, one of the inside brackets had a laser engraved apple logo!

As a former Android user, it was one thing every iPhone fanboy had on me I couldn't argue on. Not why I switched, but I now appreciate it knowing that they still give attention to that little detail.

I think it was Steve Jobs who insisted that that even the inside of their products look as clean as the outside. It unfortunately means it's a pain to disassemble, but they certainly do look pretty.

I don't think it's about showing off. It's about reliability, mechanical sturdiness, compactness, the ability to cleanly assemble the device an test it on every significant step before sealing. You can't help but end up with a neat thing to meet all these requirements.

Steve Jobs was famously obsessive about design, inside and out, call it showing off or whatever you want. He believed the internals of Apple products, like the original Macintosh, should be just as beautiful as the exterior, even if users never saw them. This attention to detail reflected his commitment to craftsmanship and quality.

Source: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography.

Fortunately, the tendencies for neatness and build quality reinforce each other.

(Sadly, Sir Ive's obsession with thinness and minimalism did not mesh with actual ergonomics equally well.)

My grandmother (she'd've been ~118, now) taught me to sew. There's specific techniques for turning down interior hems. That is, imagine a jacket: it has a shell, and a lining; I'm talking about a specific kind of hem for material between the shell and the lining. The finish work of that hem had no bearing on the quality of the item — it just demonstrated to the next tailor working on the jacket that you'd spent the time to finish the parts only they would see.

And, goddamn, it doubled the effort for finishing a jacket.

Did the turning down make the hems any less susceptible to wear and tear? Any less noticeable by the wearer?

Nothing. Just extra work. She'd say "you know it was done, that's enough".

As someone who had to work on the inside of almost every iPhone model ever made, I can tell you first hand that it is mostly about looks. Because it seems neat but there were a whole lot of decisions that made actually working on it really annoying. After the 4, they just weren't made in a way that facilitated fixing.

To be fair, at that point the replacement rate was so fast that I can see why it didn't make sense to spend time making it repairable. The issue is they kept that philosophy for way too long into models that would last quite a while and need repairs in the long term.

Now they have started fixing their act (well under a lot of both public pressure and legal pressure from EU) and the latest model doesn't just look pretty, they start to make sense from an (dis)assembly/fixing point of view.

A least now they have figured out that they can put the port on a separate board so you don't have to literally disassemble the whole phone just to replace the port (that tend to fail under heavy use, especially the models based on the 6 that needed a lot of juicing).

Looks are deceiving, don't be fooled, just because it looks neat doesn't mean it is.

I see your point, but I never meant repairability. Not even opening the back cover. Only about the efficiency of the assembly, and reliability of wearing while sealed.

In the same way, artillery shells and landmines are highly regular and neat in their internal structure which affords them the ability to bear immense loads and release large amounts of energy. But it's never about the ease of disarming them, it's exactly about the opposite, about making safe disassembly hard or impossible.

Well, I understood what you meant, but you are wrong in either your views or your language.

Here are the firsts 2 definition of the word neat: - free from dirt and disorder: habitually clean and orderly - marked by skill or ingenuity

And modern iPhone's internals do not really feel like that at all. They are interesting to look at, but the whole design is clearly made to cut costs and meet some arbitrary requirements. There is not much neat about it.

There are dozens of screws, with many different imprints (for some reason) with all kinds of different lengths (when it surely wouldn't be complicated to figure out a cleaner approach). They overuse fragile ribbon cable, often putting them in place where they can get easily damaged during disassembly/repair. They still haven't figured out a neat way to make batteries not move without relying on stupid glue stripes that always break. There are plenty of small pieces that need to be screwed down when it feels that they could be part of larger assemblies or have a better/easier way to install.

Now don't get me wrong, the iPhone is a very technologically advanced device, with extreme miniaturisation of some things that are just incredible.

But it's not something that you could call neat. It's not a perfectly symmetrical engine with shinny tubes well laid out that is just as beautiful to look at as it is powerful.

It is just a pragmatic design to accomplish a form factor at a specific price point, the rest are just side effects or nice to have. And in a way it makes sense they have this approach, because they change the thing every year, never committing to a particular form factor or set of functionalities (which is the whole point to entice replacement) but that doesn't come with neatness.

As for reliability, iPhones are not any more reliable than equally priced Android smartphones. It seems that way because Apple has higher exigence and thus better-quality control for parts and also will often swap phones for factory problems easily (under warranty or not).

But they are not any more reliable when you put price/costs into the equation, most people make the mistake of comparing a cheapo 200/300 dollars Android with a minimum 500 dollars iPhone (more likely minimum 800), it would be sad if they couldn't figure out to make them more dependable at 2-3 times the price. Hilariously, the way they do it is with forgoing neatness and adding a lot of annoyingly small parts at ingress points and using very strong glues. Not neat at all.

I don’t know if he came up with it, or if it was one of those fatherly : shop class myths, but there was a cabinet built, and the backside needed to be finished as well as the front, even though it would be nailed to a wall. The idea being that the design and craftsmanship should permeate the object.

And it really does permeate it. I'm on Linux but I run it on an Intel Mac. It will be very hard to find a non-Mac replacement. I look at the laptops at the electronics store and simply nothing comes even close. Beautiful products, it's very unfortunate though that they become ever more closed.

When I go to replace wear items such as the battery the insides of my Apple products look like goopy garbage because of all the adhesive I have to melt and scrape through.

How is that considered “gorgeous”?

Eventually people wanted to be able to use it in somewhat moderate rain or want it to survive being accidentally dropped in the pool.

What about the dozens (at this point hundreds) of phone models that are both rainproof and have a replaceable battery without melting and scraping? They exist in real, observed reality.

What about the last 15 years of MacBook models that never claimed to be waterproof but still require heat guns and risk of catastrophic immolation to extend their life beyond 3-5 years?

But for some reason the internals of an iPhone 16 are still “gorgeous”…and merit a stage appearance and endorsement from Mother Earth herself!

> What about the dozens (at this point hundreds) of phone models that are both rainproof and have a replaceable battery

If that's what you are looking for just get one. It may come even with spyware preinstalled. Then try it underwater, should be fine if it's in specs, right?

I just switched from Android for security primarily. The rest is a bonus. The problem is smartphone becomes a single point of failure. If it gets stolen I can't even work without authentication apps.

Sealing electrical stuff from water is literally 19th century tech. Plenty of underwater flashlights exist even today. If they just lose the obsession with thinness in phones, almost every other problem becomes trivial to solve. Instead they make the ultra thin, breakable phone, and then users put it in a protective case which eliminates the thinness anyway.

Thin phones are good. This is a thing you carry around in your pocket all day, you’ll notice almost every millilitre thicker and gram heavier it gets.

But don't people use phone cases anyway to protect these fragile devices? what's the point then?

X mm phone + Y mm case < (X + 1) mm phone + Y mm case

X+Y+1~=X+Y when X,Y>>1. Does it really matter if you have a 16mm or 17mm phone + case?

Thicker, stronger phone = not need protective case.

Cases protect against scratches and dents, not breaking the phone in half...

They are not that fragile if you don't drop hard. Never used case for A50, it still looks almost new after years of active use. But for iphone I got a thin case, to protect popping out cameras and to make it look cool. Main concern is thieves if I travel somewhere, not the physical damage.

Unless you drop them very hard, cases are not needed anymore. Been using a Iphone 12 pro max for 4 years without a case, I don't even look twice and I drop it from the table.

That's what Steve Jobs used to say and that's why Apple phones were 3.5 inches until he died. Who uses a 3.5 inch phone now? In fact small phones basically don't exist anymore. There were credit card or cigarette lighter sized phones that weighed under an ounce but they were 2G GSM, so now they are e-waste. There is nothing to replace them. Meanwhile the Unihertz Tank 2 weighs about a pound (22,000 mAH battery) and it's imho attractive, except too expensive.

I think it’s important especially because phones have gotten larger on the x and y axes that they remain light and small in the z axis in order to maintain pocketability. There are very thick phones with giant batteries out there for people who want that, but I think Apple has been striking the perfect balance.

What? Phones are getting bigger and bigger that people can't put them in pocket now.

Your post doesn't make sense.

A commenter complains that Apple uses a lot of adhesive inside their phones so they are not really a thing of beauty. Someone replies that it's because of water proofing. Another person points out that, no, actually plenty of companies make waterproof phones without using glue so Apple could. You tell them to go buy other another phone.

How is it in any way related to beautiful design, waterproofing and glue use in manufacturing?

in my experience from a few years ago: I commute by bicycle to shool (and in the meantime work) in a very rainy country. My entire childhood, I had to replace phones every few months jsut because they got soaked in the rain and I didn't close the protective case perfectly or whatever.

Then I started to buy waterproof phones, and my life was noticeably better. those still die from water damage, just slower. Every time you drop the phone and the case pops off, the water protection gets a bit worse, and after a year or so, the rubber gets hard, especially in winter, and its no longer waterproof. I wouldn't dare to put it in actual water.

Now I have had my smartphone for many years, and I had the previous one for many years. So yes please, glue it together, glue it shut, at least if you're serious about water damage and dust ingress

A ziplock bag would have solved your problems

I feel like most phones have pretty clean internals these days. Apple goes the extra aesthetic mile to make everything same shade of grey/metal/black.

They have learned aesthetics>quality.

Its cheaper to make something pretty, than good. Humans use this shortcut and have a hard time resisting it.

My experience opening an iphone box, giving all my personal information, and seeing the home screen of my work iphone was fun and exciting.

Then within a few minutes, the swiping/changing between apps was noticably slow, the podcast app had a bug in it, and it kept asking me to 'sign in' by typing my password. The illusion had broke, and its not like I was going to return the phone now.

So it’s more expensive to make something ugly. Gotcha ;)

The slowness might be explained by the background tasks of restoring previously installed software and data. I have an iPhone 13 Pro with tons of apps and it’s still pretty snappy. But those specific bugs do pop up from time to time. Especially since they release new phones concurrently with new operating systems.

>So it’s more expensive to make something ugly. Gotcha ;)

What is the point of this? Does anyone enjoy this? Everyone knows what is being said based on the context?

>The slowness might be explained by the background tasks of restoring previously installed software and data.

No, it never went away. I had been coming from a Pixel, so I wasnt really forgiving about bugs, limited features, or slow animations. It felt like I bought an old phone. That + the otterbox really dispelled the illusion.

Otterbox is a meme. Might as well carve out a hole in a nerf football to stick your phone inside. The thin leather cases + glass screen protector do nearly just as much to protect the phone and also don't feel like garbage to use.

> Then within a few minutes

> its not like I was going to return the phone now.

Sounds like you're your own worst enemy here. You're well within the return window and could easily do so and replace it with, uh... well... let us know which mobile OS has more polish than iOS, I guess.

Out of all the things to complain about with Apple software/hardware, I think quality isn't one of them. The devices and accompanying software are very high quality.

They're not repairable, they're quite restrictive, and they're perhaps too simple. But definitely high quality.

Idk, did the butterfly keyboards scream quality to you?

Did it say "we care about quality so much that we've very carefully designed and built these, and tested them extensively to ensure that our customers have a quality experience"? No, it did not.

Not only that but there has been a refusal to acknowledge almost every single critical flaw in Apple's products and when they're finally pressured to do so, they brush it off.

This is just more culty bs.

There used to be cases for iPhones idk if they still exist, that show off the internals back 10 years or so. iPhones were always easier to open up and work on than Android phones in the early years. So even though they push things so they do repairs, they make it so that even if they don't fix your stuff, it's not a clobbered mess of things inside.

There are Teardown and X-Ray decals available from dbrand which were created in partnership with Zack from the JerryRigEverything YouTube channel and accurately represent the internals of the phone. They can attach directly to the back of the phone and there is also a case available.

Teardown: https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/teardown

X-Ray: https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/x-ray

I've got one on my S24 Ultra and love it. Personally, I prefer to have the decal directly attached to the back of the phone with a clear case on top.

Before these, we had the real thing, which is what I assume giancarlostoro is referring to

https://www.cultofmac.com/news/make-the-back-of-your-iphone-...

This has the parts of my brain wired for:

  - working on cars (the torque "wrench" click is such a cue)
  - dissembling electronics 
  - watching folks work on... mechanical watches
  - unnecessary / creative uses for a CNC

all firing. I feel pandered to directly... and consider its a mostly silent video of someone replacing a nand chip, I'm not how to feel about that.

On a more constructive topic: Can the performance/endurance characteristics be modified by using better nand chips(a la ram)? Or does it have to an Apple blessed part?

If you are okay with losing your operating system each time the phone turns off...

Did you think that comment was suggesting replacing NAND with DRAM? I'm pretty sure it's just asking if there are varying speed grades of NAND the way there are varying speed grades of DRAM.

M539/TronicsFix/Wristwatch Revival...

NAND only gets faster by having more of it in parallel.

Not exactly true. For example, QLC is slower than TLC.

I say "click" when I need to hit the right torque setting.

The technical skill of the modder is unreal.

That said, imagine that is Israeli security service removing and replacing the nand storage.

EDIT TO ADD: Pointing out how a determined state-level attacker could pin-point a single individual.

> removing and replacing the nand storage.

But... with this kind of removal, what would these government agents gain besides a free blank phone?

Replace it in the box with hardware-level malware installed.

We know, from multiple leaks, that clandestine services from multiple countries, including the US and China, have supply chain attacks, where they intercept computing equipment and install hardware backdoors into it.

Intercept an iPhone, replace the 128GB storage with a 128GB storage and some extra rootkit. Or anything else really.

If you can bypass Apple's secure boot, you probably don't need to do a complete swap of the physical storage medium to get that rootkit installed.

Why pin point a single individual? They can just boobie trap a whole shipment of iPhones and let them hit the markets. Terror's a numbers game! /s

To evade detection of payload.

Reality sadly goes much further than your imagination.

Dumping without desoldering, reflashing in place, generally speaking if you think it's theorically possible, someone probably have tried. If they have your device, you have already lost.

Supply chain attacks to computers have been documented in various countries. I don't think attacking the iPhone's NAND is practical, though, as it would also need to somehow bypass the signature verification system of the CPU, and even then everything on the chip would be encrypted before it hits the flash.

It's possible that there are bootloader exploits, but fortunately you can't beat these devices as easily as you can on PC.

Pretty hard to find free space inside an iphone to put explosives like they did with the pagers.

Is it? A slightly smaller battery would make room.

But then the counterfeit battery wouldn't be usable in a modern iphone due to lacking the cryptographic signature.

Just watched this at 2x speed and the precision/stability of the hands is remarkable, especially when extracting the tiny foam gaskets.

It’s still impressive at 1x.

Seriously, made me think he was on beta-blockers or something to be so smooth. (insinuating PEDs were used for iPhone modding- we're through the looking glass here people. :P)

Nah. It makes total sense that he was on Phone Enhancing Drugs.

How do people watch videos at 2x speed? I don't know if it's just me but I can only do it for a couple of minutes before I stop following along.

2x is slow, 4x keeps you on your toes.

Usually, if a video is too slow I find it frustrating and I'm more likely to stop watching or increase the speed.

It's not like I'm actually following along with a screwdriver and iPhone so I don't need to watch it at 1x speed.

They are in a hurry to get to the next video that needs watching.

It's a matter of getting used to. I raised it little by little and I'm comfortable at 3x in most videos now.

I sometimes watch at 1.5-2ish speed since many variants of American accent speak sooooo, sooooooo slowly.

Also the general Youtuber culture of speaking slowly to draw out video length = more ads.

Is there a hardware restraint for why he chose just 1TB?

I'm seeing 2TB/4TB/8TB Nand Flash being sold online (the latter for a hefty ~$650). Is there anything stopping me from paying a professional like this to install an 8TB unit?

edit: I see those NAND flash models are supported by Macbooks. Perhaps I am mistaken in thinking an iPhone could support it.

Could you provide a link to 4TB in a single chip though? 2TB chips started appearing only this summer...

Maybe it's a BIOS/firmware thing: replacing the RAM memory chips on a Steam Deck to 32GB total requires BIOS tweaks to recognize the chips. I assume in this case the motherboard may be trained to recognize up to 1TB, like the highest capacity model sold. 2TB+ may be too high density to "just work" out of the box.

I wonder what happens if you increase the storage beyond what is offered by Apple in one of the models. Will it just work as normal with 2TB/4TB/8TB? Or will the OS realize that something funky is going on and try to restrict it?

Storage controller for the NAND is on the SoC so it only works for specific configurations of NAND. Assuming it followed the pattern of the M series Mac’s.

Seen this before with other models. 1 TiB is a factory option, so it's not like the days when Asian market hacks gave 4x or 8x what was available.

There's also that video of a guy adding a headphone jack in a similar fashion. I was impressed that he found the internal room for it.

Possibly Strange Parts: https://www.strangeparts.com/bringing-back-the-iphone-headph...

I never understood why this was always seen as such a constraint. It’s three (or four) pins! It doesn’t even have to have the “hole” form factor. You could have them all in a straight line and then place a headphone jack AGAINST them. I always thought a magnetic TRRS set of pins along the side of a phone could work. Add a sleeve to the connector’s side too. Heck you could standardize a flattened TRRS or whatever that would still slip readily into a typical jack.

When you already need an adapter you might as well use the usb-c connector.

That was on the iPhone 7. Its internals really look like the decision to omit the headphone jack was made pretty late in the development cycle, so they replaced it with a useless piece of plastic.

In part 2 he reassembles the 128MB memory chip dust and solders it in a 32MB iPhone.

I was sure this was going to be a dosdude1 video, he's upgraded the flash on a lot of things

https://youtube.com/@dosdude1

I started watching this and as someone else commented, yeah, things looked doable at the start and then got progressively more impressive and insane. It's clear they know what they're doing. From the extremely intricate tools for each and every specific step, to the screwdriver that tightens only the exact amount when putting things back together, to - what! - CNC milling off an entire component?! I was so impressed. Surely their day job must be in some way related to assembling this phone?

I just don't understand why people would want to keep supporting a company that is actively holding customers back in countless ways.

Because i really dont want anything to do with google and there is really only 2 choices.

You have the choice to not own a smartphone.

The competition doesn't provide a product package that is superior for everyone's use case, so Apple users balance the trade-offs and decide they prefer Apple's products even with its caveats?

It's not like Pixel + Android, Samsung + Android, etc. produce objectively better products in every way.

it works better than the offerings from competition, and Apple isn't beholden to China.

For me, I can buy a phone that works and will work for 6-8 years with software updates. I'm on my second iPhone, an 11 pro, that I've had for 5 years at this point. I have to use an Android phone for work and we replace them every two years as the security updates stop.

I wonder what the reasoning is for grinding off the old chip instead of desoldering properly? Maybe the heat would damage something?

The chip has an epoxy underfill. It softens slightly in the heat and desoldering is probably possible, but the amount of force required means you're likely to damage something in the process.

It's hard to see but the original NAND is epoxied to the motherboard, which wouldn't come away easily with heat. I'm not sure what the purpose of the epoxy is but he goes to the trouble of replacing the epoxy later in the video so there must be a good reason for it.

The epoxy protects from physical shocks and also helps manage the effects of thermal expansion, either of which could crack solder joints over time.

Ah, not taking any chances after bumpgate.

Apple has been epoxying BGAs at least as far back as the iPod nano 1st gen, released in 2005

I’ve seen some fascinating slo mo videos of devices bouncing from a decent fall in an X-ray machine. The battery in particular squishes way more than you think should be possible or right. Epoxy makes a ton of sense when you consider the shock that it takes.

It's called "underfill" and it's common for BGAs since the chip doesn't have the same thermal expansion as the PCB

CNC drill removal is safe and can be done consistently by a machine with consistent predictable results.

From the creator, in a reply:

"CNC is the safest and most efficient way. Using a hot air gun to remove it normally will cause irreversible damage to other components on the motherboard."

Yet, he uses hot air gun to solder the new chip. There are ways to safely remove that old nand chip, but why would they show the state of the art methods?

The epoxy below the original chip would require a lot more heating to remove than soldering in a plain chip.

Are there any manufacturers/standards that both pair parts to your phone (to make theft not worthwhile) but also allow authenticated unpairing of parts to your phone (to allow part reuse)? I am conflicted in that I like the idea of right to repair but I also like that locking things down helps fight phone theft.

I imagine that something like this ought to be feasible:

- the phone comes with a secret key baked into it

- upon installation of parts, some secret generated from that key is baked into some secret enclave in the part to “pair” the part with your device so it can’t be harvested

- the OS a provides a function to “unpair” a part with your phone that requires use of the secret key, so you can reuse that part elsewhere

- parts are sold “unpaired” and therefore can be used with any phone (maybe via some open protocol to allow many manufacturers to provide parts, not just the OEM)

Yes, iOS 18

> the OS a provides a function to “unpair” a part

With your idea, if my phone gets damaged to a point I can't access that function anymore, all of its parts are non-reusable and complete e-waste. IMO a better and less complicated solution would be to blacklist the serial numbers when a phone is reported stolen, and phones can check serial numbers against a server (if offline just assume the parts are fine for now). Parts should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around.

There's probably ways to break this system such as blacklisting the servers from your DNS and never connecting to any network other than your home, but it makes the phone much less practical to use and it only takes one slip-up for the phone to brick itself

I am personally willing to allow some e-waste to make theft not worthwhile, which is mostly just a difference in our values. But maybe there’s a variation that would allow for both.

Wow it's almost like they should put an... sd card slot.

What a heretical idea. Surely all storage should be soldered down to the logic board, for security.

For watertightness, more accurately.

What about the dozens of phone models that have SD slots and waterproof ratings? Please don’t unquestioningly regurgitate propaganda.

What are some examples of phones with SD card slots and similar waterproof ratings? A quick google search didnt turn up much

They're in the same tray as the SIM card, you don't see people crying for esims because of waterproofing. And a simple gasket around the port is enough for the IP68 or whatever kind of rating the iphones and co have nowadays

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s5-6033.php

Samsung Galaxy S5 from 2014. Headphone jack, SD card slot, and swappable battery. IP67 water resistant. Almost everything since then has been a regression.

You can get a Nikonos V underwater film camera around $300 on ebay these days too. Designed by Jacques Cousteau in the 1960s, can shoot under 150+ feet of water, and is supposedly a good all-around rugged outdoor camera as well. I'd sort of want one but I haven't used any of my film camera gear in years.

>After every charge and boot sequence, the [Galaxy S5] reminds the user to preserve the IP67 rating by securing the back cover and making sure the USB flap is closed.

Nobody wants to faff around with this stuff just in case today's going to be the day that they drop their phone in a puddle.

MicroSD cards go into the same slot the SIM cards go into. Unless Apple stopped taking SIM cards, there's going to be a bit that takes a sliver of plastic and metal. Clearly, Apple has already solved this problem, they just choose not to add the design complexity (and frankly, damage to their popcorn pricing model) of a microSD slot.

Apple has stopped taking SIM cards in US devices. Only the iPhones sold in Europe still have sim slots, and I assume those do worse in immersion testing.

bold assumption to make without sources or testing. Rubber gaskets are a thing and last time I had a sim slot on my iphone, they had one there.

I know immersion testing is about depth and time, but 99% of the time phones are in danger of water damage, we are talking about a 6' pool or a 6 inch bathtub/sink/toilet for 15 seconds, not being submerged in 100' of seawater for 10 days while SCUBA diving. A rubber gasket on a SIM tray does perfectly fine in these normal situations.

I think it takes a pretty tortured interpretation of reality to not acknowledge that Apple hates SD cards for one reason only: So they can sell additional storage for $100 per 128GB (and secondarily, because when people underestimate their needs, they're likely to either pay for expensive iCloud storage to compensate, or upgrade their otherwise perfectly working phone in a short time in order to get a bigger SSD. Apple wins in all cases.)

They're protecting their legendary, industry-leading margins. Which they're free to do. And we customers are free to deride them for their extreme stinginess.

No doubt, but we're 10 years on, if we'd carried on down the path of swappable storage we'd probably also have solved these minor ux things - no USB flaps on modern waterproof phones f.ex

A compromise would be having a slot inside the case. But we all know why they don't have any option to increase the storage to begin with. "That'll be an additional $500 for the upgrade please."

Any phones that aren't a decade old?

Over 500 results here https://geizhals.de/?cat=umtsover&pg=1&v=e&hloc=at&hloc=de&s...

Galaxy S20?

are you actually serious or are you joking?

Wow, slow down there Charlie.

Save some innovation for the iPhone 16 AI max plus.

Any ideas how much that 1TB NAND chip costs? Significantly less than Apples $500 premium for the 1TB SKU I'm sure, but how much less exactly?

Terabyte nvmes selling for 60-80 dollars these days, and thats much higher than the prices last year. You’d be best off getting the top stuff though, I doubt Apple is using Chinese QLC, or bottom binned TLC.

I suppose 2230 NVMe drives are probably the best proxy because those use a single very dense NAND chip similar to the one in the iPhone. Those are around $100 for 1TB TLC, but that includes the NVMe controller and retail markup.

They're also using bulk pricing for the IC though, single quantity from digikey is around $130

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/memory/774?s=N4Ig...

A single 8Tbit NAND is about $130 in single quantities.

Why use bits here when storage is usually measured in bytes? 8 Terabit == 1 Terabyte.

because that's what the underlying NAND chips the actual storage is made up of, are measured in

The industry uses bits rather than bytes. If you buy 1tb NAND from a factory or NAND dealer, you're going to get 128GiB (or perhaps even 125TiB) of storage. The conversion to bytes generally happens the moment products start being offered to end users.

What is the white powdery/smokey stuff he drops on the eMMC chip using the soldering iron at 7min27s? Some kind of flux?

Yes, it is flux (solid rosin). He vaporizes some with the iron and the smoke resolidifies on the contacts, so there is a very thin layer of flux to help with the soldering.

Interesting, I’ve never seen this before. How does it compare to regular gooey or liquid flux? Also how does it work? Just bringing a chunk of rosin next to a soldering iron would just vaporize the flux as seen on the video?

My grandfather who learned electronics work in the USSR worked with solid rosin.

When you touch the iron with the rosin, it starts smoking like incense at a church (same stuff actually), but a small amount remains on the tip. You transfer this to the contact you’re soldering, dip into the rosin again, and then solder as usual.

Probably a dumb question, but what are the 3 taps for after screwing each screw? I presume they are tapping the screwdriver itself?

> Probably a dumb question, but what are the 3 taps for after screwing each screw? I presume they are tapping the screwdriver itself?

I think it’s a torque screwdriver.

They're using a torque screwdriver, which ensures tightening to a specified torque to prevent excessive tightening. The "clicking" is made by the clutch that disengages once the preset torque has been reached.

It’s a torque screwdriver as others have said but to me it made the whole video into an asmr experience.

Shame that the existing NAND has to be turned to dust. Gone are the days of upgradable hardware.

It really is a shame no one has ever successfully added some form of small scale extendable storage to a phone that Apple could have copied so they are entirely forced to upsell you a phone 500$ more expensive so you can get extended storage at a five fold markup. Surely, if it was the case, customers would never stand being taken for such fools and would do something. /s

On a more serious tone, I hate Apple for the way they do their products segmentation. It's for me the best proof that the market is not competitive enough. Multiple screen support forcing you on the pro line, decently sized storage requiring you fork 500$, the stuborn refusal to allow tablet users a proper interface to not canibalize the laptop sales, it's outrageous what Apple can get away with. Not that their main competitors are shaking the boat much mind you. Oligopolies are awful.

At least, you can now record video directly to a usb-c connected hard drive but only in ProRes and no luck for photos (because f*** you that's why).

If you find this interesting you might also like repairing graphics cards and with that I mean stuff like fixing traces on the inner layers of the board. I just picked the first search result [1], not sure if that one is especially interesting or not.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwNB4uD5Pts

I can't believe they had to grind the memory chip off. I would have expected reflow work or something. Incredible.

I'm astonished that it works! To my understanding, the 128GB has specifications for how to "talk" to it on its datasheet and same with the 1TB. Do they have the same manufacturer for them to have the same pinout?

And, how come they're the same size lol. Intuitively, I'd expect the 1TB to be way bigger.

Generally most memory uses standardized physical/electrical/firmware interfaces from JEDEC, an industry consortium. I do not know for certain if the iPhone memory is standard.

Mobile RAM/Flash packages are usually made in larger capacities by stacking several dies within a package. This can involve die thinning - grinding the dies thinner so they fit within the same space after stacking.

1TB storage comes from another donor iPhone apparently so it makes sense it just fits and works. I guess Apple didn't think of matching them to specific motherboards so you can still reuse them

Did they reassemble the cnc dust to get the donor 1TB?

For donor phone, they probably kept 1TB NAND intact but CNCed away the rest of phone

This dude has more manufacturing skills than most countries.

this makes me feel better about paying for a 512GB model.

Is this economically viable or just a show-off? Because considering the skilled labour and equipment, I’m not sure it’d be much cheaper than the $500 upgrade.

I don't have an answer but you can upgrade your existing phone you already bought using that method/service. Otherwise cost of official "upgrade" is $500 and a new iphone

It's not economically viable because the NANDs come from donor systems. Apple prevents the NAND oem from selling to anyone but them. It's part of their anti right to repair strategy.

Are you sure? Why would he need to reinstall the OS then?

Because there's a good chance that NAND came from a Mac and 1/4 of macos isn't going to boot on an iPhone.

To be completely honest I'm surprised; I would've thought that Apple would have locked it down such that the part can't just be replaced and immediately work. Guess for them it's just not worth it given that doing this swap out isn't all that popular in the first place (because of effort).

Interesting the USB-C connector has A3294 China engraved into it. My production US version of 16 Pro has no such engraving.

Chinese market iPhones are different SKU and have been for a long time. Originally it was for different kinds of SIM but that's not relevant anymore. Maybe a regulatory thing.

Does anyone know what's the purpose of the foam that's being removed at 3:50? Is it for waterproofing?

Multiple purposes I suspect: Reduce vibration, even out thermals, etc. If water has gotten to that foam, something has probably gone very wrong.

My first thought is acoustics.

Empty spaces are resonant spaces, and this can be heard when the phone's speaker(s) are playing sounds and/or the microphones are microphoning. Mechanically damping resonances is always superior to handling them with DSP -- a DSP doesn't need to account for resonances that simply aren't problematic to begin with, freeing it for other duties.

Such resonances can also be heard when handling the phone -- even when it is off. Tapping on the phone and hearing/feeling a dull, well-damped thud inspires more of a perception of solidity than a lingering resonance does, even though such foam itself contributes nothing to to the structure of the device at all.

Even back in the iPod days, one of the stated goals of the designers at Apple was to make their handhelds feel like a singular piece, like something that naturally grows that way (think fruits, crystals, etc) instead of disparate pieces tenuously held together. An impression of solidity falls in line with that idea.

Fruits. Yet if you gently tap on a biological apple, a ripe one actually feels slightly hollow inside.

This is amazing, I'm surprised it actually worked!

Makes me want to say: “Now imagine if things like that were actually user-replaceable”.

But I feel like we're very far, if not the farthest, away from upgradable/modular phones.

That is some craftsmanship!

I'm surprised Apple didn't hardcode the NAND capacity based on the model number, so even though he installs 1TB it'll still only allow 128GB to be used.

I've wondered for a while if the 'non user upgradable' Macs were actually upgradable with enough effort. Seems so!

Even the ones with non-soldered NAND can't be upgraded by anyone besides Apple. The NAND chips are serialized or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEwS_VGD2yY&t=620s

That's a bullshit video. The guy conducting the tests doesn't know enough about how SSDs work or about how Macs boot to be drawing conclusions, especially not such strongly negative conclusions. He would have had to at the very least attempt a tethered restore from DFU (as is done for these phone storage swaps or any other situation where the NAND is blank or thoroughly corrupted) before concluding that Apple has everything totally locked down.

Adding the second drive module is something that we should not expect to work the way he tested it. Plugging in a second hard drive to a desktop does not magically give you a RAID-0 without extra steps; expecting this from SSDs doesn't make any more sense. And without reverse engineering the machine config from the quoted prices, we don't even know if the two modules had the same capacity, let alone the same type and manufacturer of NAND (which is probably important if the system is going to treat the two modules as one SSD instead of exposing them to the OS as one drive).

Confusion is understandable here because such technicalities were not officially documented and the community had not figured it out at such an early point.

> Adding the second drive module is something that we should not expect to work

Hard disagree. This approach works for just about any normal storage medium. Apple decided to Think Different about where the SSD controller lives and works and how storage pinouts work, but their weird approach wasn't publicly documented anywhere until people like this guy started trying.

Uninitialised storage would've normally showed up just like that, as uninitialised storage, ready to be partitioned. Instead, the device didn't even turn on, let alone show the added flash storage in a partitioning tool.

You're still thinking of the storage modules as standalone SSDs to be managed by software, rather than devices hidden behind hardware RAID.

I did almost exactly the same kind of drive-swapping tests with the WD Black AN1500 [0] in an Intel PC, with the same results in terms of whether the system can boot from the device, but none of that supports the conclusion that Western Digital is locking down what drives can be used behind that RAID controller. You can swap drives on the AN1500, but almost any such operation will require you to erase and reinstall.

[0] https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-b...

phone storage hasn't mattered to me in years, what do you guys need the huge storage these days? the bulk of my data in the past was photos and videos, but now those are uploaded to the cloud and i instantly delete from my local phone.

...as planned by apple

Can you do this without apple managing your data?

(it would be really nice to have a personal icloud replacement)

i use android and google photos because it's really cool to auto match faces of my friends and family.

but think about it, how crazy that someone can steal your phone and you would be totally fucked, priceless memories lost forever. now with cloud that's a non-issue no?

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Apple/Google can permanently lock you out of your iCloud account at any instant. You can only be sure of access to your data if it is physically on you.

And if you encounter pickpockets or get mugged, you won't have access to that data either. And don't forget to worry about natural disasters taking out your home.

Which is exactly why you should have a local copy and a cloud backup.

You can self host Immich for a photos replacement, including some of the neat machine learning tricks.

I like having things stored locally. I'm not always in a spot with great reception, so waiting for a video to load from google photos or whatever isn't an option.

Removable storage should come standard with any mobile device. It's ridiculous to have to do these kinds of methods to increase storage.

> Removable storage should come standard with any mobile device.

Removable storage should come standard with any device.

Sadly, Black and Decker no longer offers the Hammer + SD card combo deal.

Touché

The iPhone Pro supports high speed external removable storage via the USB-C port. I plug a thumb drive into my iPhone 15 Pro Max all the time.

Next EU regulation incoming.

I don’t want to hand over my pictures to a 3rd party.

Why not? The major player in this space (icloud) can do end to end encryption and it's easy to do local backups on your NAS

With all the celebrity leaks, hundreds of them (remember the fappening?), I don’t believe the encryption is the problem. It’s usually social engineering or cracking a password that leads to these leaks.

Use a good password and a 2fa token. Not rocket science

Local LLM models can be many GBs each. One can have many of them.

Is that something you actually do with your phone?

Look at all the hype around AI assistants lately. Having those run locally is definitely much better from a privacy perspective.

Many models of many GB each on a phone with only 8GB of DRAM doesn't make sense. Even on Android phones that have more DRAM than that, there's not enough performance for large models to be useful, let alone multiple models consuming tens of GB of storage.

> Many models of many GB each on a phone with only 8GB of DRAM doesn't make sense.

> there's not enough performance for large models to be useful

For iPhone, the Private LLM app offers 44 models in its easy-install menu right now (on 15 promax), with avg model size about 2.7 GB.

Total GB is ~120 GB to install and compare them all.

People could argue about what being useful means, but asking these different models the same question can give quite different (and indeed thought-provokingly different) results.

They all have either different foundations or different fine tuning or something. The same prompt gives rather different answers depending on what model you pick. It's fun that way.

So to compare their outputs, one would need 120GB free at once, then install them all, or else do some very inefficient and weird dance of uninstall-then-reinstall n times while picking and choosing which ones to try out for a given prompt.

And that's just for one offline "gen AI" app. There might be others.

This can be done offline, while on a walk, or whatever, without hitting any servers at all, in the palm of one's hand. Performance is good enough on iPhone for a bunch of tasks/prompts.

So, IDK. Does part of that not make sense? These models not being run run at once, and don't need to be in RAM at once. They're being stored on disk at once to be used when wanted. They initialize one at a time when in use. The large disk size is for storing the models. The phone can then use the models when wanted.

(Granted, it's not the "same" as hitting huge versions of the models sitting on some beefy infra, but we're talking about mobile devices here and actual current uses for having a bunch of local storage available on them.)

So what I'm hearing is that you don't have a use case for having 44 LLMs on your phone simultaneously, aside from testing different LLMs for the sake of testing different LLMs. There's no way a user would want to keep all 44 LLMs around indefinitely; nobody could possibly remember which one they prefer for which type of query across that many models. I can believe there are uses for having a handful of models around and for trying out new ones when they become available, but I can't see many users bothering to thoroughly evaluate dozens of models at once.

We're getting away from the point. What does it matter what the specific use case is? Who are you to be the arbiter of a valid or invalid use case? This one guy didn't justify himself to fulfill your arbitrary personal requirements; I guess that means nobody should even have the option of removable storage and that we should all be okay with paying an extra few hundred dollars for five more gigabytes of space on our phones (or whatever the insane going rate is now).

> What does it matter what the specific use case is?

Recall where the thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631782 A question about what use cases people have for large amounts of storage on phones, aside from photos and videos that are easily offloaded to the cloud. When someone replies that they need tons of storage for LLMs, it's quite reasonable to want to understand where that need comes from, how much storage is actually needed for that use case, and whether it's anything that could become popular enough to influence product design decisions or if it's something that will only ever be done by HN nerds. If the best use cases HN can come up with for more storage on phones are things that are unlikely to go mainstream, then we should be assuming that phone manufacturers aren't going to be feeling much pressure to change their storage strategies.

Complaints about product design choices rarely produce interesting discussion when they can be reduced down to the complainer not making the distinction between their personal usage patterns and those of the target market in general. LLMs are still a very new class of workloads for phones, and what an early-adopter HN user is doing with LLMs on a phone could be a preview of an emerging trend that may go mainstream—very on-topic for HN discussion. But in this case it looks more like a use case that will forever remain an outlier.

(It's totally okay to be an outlier and do things with your gadgets that hardly anyone else would choose to do or even think of doing.)

Intuitively you shouldn't even need to ask this question though. There are a billion and a half iPhone users out there. Numbers at this scale can be tricky to comprehend, but the takeaway should be that even if just 10% of users want the option (an extremely conservative estimate), that's still 150 million people with a need. That's more people than there are HN viewers (not just users) there are per day, several times over, so this is absolutely not a need only floated by "HN nerds." Hell, even 1% of the iPhone userbase vastly outnumbers HN by every metric. There is obviously demand, and I mean popular, non-nerd demand. Ask your friends or parents if they would like more space on their iPhone or if they have ever had to delete an app to make space for another or if they have ever been reluctant to install an app because it was too big. A very common one I see especially with older folks is that they take too many pictures and agonize over deleting some to get more space, and yes, they could use iCloud, but they're very old and hardly understand software, much less as a subscription service. Much easier for their grandkid to pop in a 2 TB micro SD and call it a day (not to mention several times cheaper, but let's get to that next!). This is not up for debate, demand absolutely exists at a massive scale.

You are right however that "manufacturers [specifically Apple] aren't going to be feeling much pressure" to change their design because right now they are absolutely gouging the general public and making hundreds of millions of dollars off of it. An iPhone 16 Pro 128 GB is $1000, and a TB is $1500. They are selling less than a terabyte of space for five hundred dollars, over five times the cost of a gold standard 1 TB micro SD which costs under $100. If you opt for iCloud you pay almost a thousand dollars a year, well over 10x as much as a micro SD. Of course there is no pressure to divert from their current model: They're getting away with highway robbery. Scale that to the 150 million or so people with a valid need for storage (again, this is an extremely conservative estimate) and you have numbers in the billions. They will ABSOLUTELY ignore a valid need and never fix the problem of not offering a reasonable storage method if their insane storage method results in so much money.

> but the takeaway should be that even if just 10% of users want the option (an extremely conservative estimate),

Do you mean 10% of iPhone users want to keep a few dozen LLMs on their phone (obvious bullshit), or that in aggregate at least 10% of iPhone users would buy more storage if it was cheaper (to say nothing of the customers who always buy the most expensive config as conspicuous consumption)?

I meant 10% of iPhone users have a valid need for additional storage space. That can mean LLMs or just having a lot of apps or photos. If you had read past the first sentence you would have known that...

Yes, and it's awesome.

I’ve done the math on whether it’s cheaper to pay for 1tb of local storage or 1tb of cloud, and local wins.

What about for a whole family of iPhone users? I've got the 2TB cloud plan which my elderly parents are on, my kids are on and me and my wife are on which is letting us get away with the smallest class of storage for each device we have.

Fair question! To figure this out, you could calculate the price per GB that you're paying and that you would pay for local and compare the two values. Cloud storage can and often does have a better deal in instances like yours!

With that said, your instance is just your instance, and for swathes of people it will be cheaper to have local storage. Them having the option of local storage wouldn't hurt you, so I would hope for their sake you would still support giving them that choice.

Your media is more valuable when stored locally, because they can be retrieved easily without waiting for network conditions.

this consumes bandwidth, battery and cpu(?)

If you have the know how and the discipline to maintain proper backup strategy, then local storage(@ home) always wins over cloud in terms of pricing, flexibility or freedom.

If you're shooting photos raw, it matters. (I don't know anyone who insta-deletes photos from their phone even if they don't shoot raw.)

If you're shooting prores video... you have a portable usb-c jbod array, so I guess it doesn't matter indeed.

I have a lot of music on my phone. When I’m not in the US (I travel a lot), streaming music will eat up all of my data.

Cool, but hardly it was cheaper than just buying iPhone 16 Pro 1TB storage option.

can anyone explain why they have to grind off the old chip? (instead of unsolder it)

The old NAND chip is epoxied in (they reapply the epoxy on the new NAND chip too after installing later in the video).

How much does it cost?

I don't know if anyone can offer something like that seriously. And I don't mean it badly. Technically, a conversion including warranty would certainly be possible. But would it work commercially?

More capacity and faster.

Impressive work on undoing the Apple engineering and unnecessarily soldered component. The CNC grinding guarantees this is out of reach for many people.

The blatant greedy decisions Apple makes is what has turned me away from their devices in general. Been winding down my usage for a few years now and aging out my current devices.

> and unnecessarily soldered component

Seriously? Do you want a M.2 card slot in your phone?

(micro)SD/TF, many phones still have one.

All of those phones still have soldered storage as their primary storage. Removable primary storage isn't really a thing for smartphones, so calling it an "unnecessarily soldered component" is an extraordinary claim presented without any evidence. There's no standard removable storage form factor that's small enough to use inside smartphones that offers adequate performance for what's typical of today's smartphone operating systems and applications. microSD cards are fine for storing photos and videos (more for reading than sustained writing), but are horrible for random access and the performance gap between microSD and the soldered primary storage in phones is only getting wider.

> There's no standard removable storage form factor that's small enough to use inside smartphones that offers adequate performance for what's typical of today's smartphone operating systems and applications.

The question is why? I doubt that there are technical reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Flash_Storage#Versio...

Looks like the UFS card interface only has one lane, but phones have been using two lanes for more performance for a long time. Samsung is planning a four-lane UFS solution for next year, but it's not clear whether that's intended for phones or laptops (their Snapdragon X Elite laptop uses UFS rather than NVMe). And the removable UFS cards standards have tended to lag behind by a few years on link speed, so it's really a 4x discrepancy in bandwidth between soldered UFS and removable UFS cards.

In theory, something like UFS cards could have performance parity with soldered UFS (at least for the link speed; not sure if a package that small is adequate from a power/thermal perspective when stuffed with 1TB of NAND). But UFS cards have been dead on arrival in the market several times now, so it's understandable that nobody wants to try an even more ambitious version in the hopes that it can finally catch on.

I think UFS might catch on if Samsung started cooperating with Samsung and Samsung to build a Samsung phone that would take Samsung UFS cards. Alas, I fear this can never happen, as Samsung wouldn't want Samsung's products to compete with their own storage tiers.

The problem with microSD vs UFS is that microSD is actually more than fast enough for most use cases if you buy good cards. Random I/O on SD cards is rarely a requirement even of phones with SD cards in them. Most of the time it's just bulk writing or reading video files and downloads.

SD wouldn't come close to the bandwidth and latency that the on-board NAND is giving, which is a key bottleneck to device performance.

My MacbookPro NAND outperforms all the M.2 NVME sticks I can install in my windows PC.

CNC not needed, they just F with users...

User capture+lock in. I mean every sane minded person runs away from the iphone ecosystem when the first how can I get this file out from my phone and why it's such a mess experience kicks in.

I am on that path as well, considering how filthy rich they are, the greed is not just unreasonable it's a complete fuck you to the customer.

If it was just on the phone I wouldn't care as much (can get away with buying less often or second hand) but the reproduction of the models on the Macs is just inacceptable since everything is soldered. I wouldn't mind paying a bit of premium on RAM/storage but it is just a big "fuck you", because we can, at the moment.

Considering how fast they are obsoleting older hardware (just because they can) it doesn't even make sense to pretend that you will recoup the cost over time (won't last twice as long as less expensive PC).

And macOS is aging poorly, feeling the effects of neglect and doubling down on fully closed strategy.

Apple doesn't have to care because they have new customers that don't care about any of that; it's mostly people that buy entry level hardware though, which is kind of hilarious when you think about their luxury strategy (mass market "luxury" is so dumb).

Now, to be honest I have still some hopes left for the upcoming M4 devices (sales have slowed to a stop, so they have the signal) but still I'm doubt the pricing will make sense.

It's just sad because Apple has more money than it knows what to do with productively, it's just a terribly managed company nowadays contrary to what the idiots who believe stock price is everything (imaginary value) like to think.

Imagine messing up the 1 TB NAND install and having to grind it to dust....owch.

I’ll just spend more for the storage lol.

Live reactions watching this video:

Remove two screws from the bottom of the phone – easy, I can totally do this!

Soften the glue and pull out the back – hmm, I guess it's doable if I can find replacement glue.

Disconnect dozens of cables and parts – wow, it's going to be hard to remember how everything goes back together.

Peel off protective foam from motherboard – is it even possible to replace this stuff?

CNC grind the existing 128GB NAND to dust – I should probably stop watching now...

I was also blown away at CNC grinding step. Perhaps he did it because heat gun would have impacted other parts of the PCB. With grinding the impact was limited to Nand chip only. He eventually had to use heat to cleanup the residue.

It's more so the 128GB package is not worth that much, so it's easier to just delete it.

You also need to be pretty precise with attaching the phone in an exact position, and grinding things with a very low margin of error, say, 0.05 mm along the vertical axis, in order to remove the chip but leave the PCB intact. Not for the faint of the heart.

I suppose they have had several training rounds using badly broken phones first.

> I suppose they have had several training rounds using badly broken phones first.

Can't be very many of those yet. The iPhone 16 only became available for sale last Friday.

Obviously he meant other broken phones, like older models or other brands entirely

Yes, the flash chips are approximately the same in their mechanical properties. Milling speed, debris removal, depth of milling to keep the PCB intact, treatment of the PCB.afterwards to clear it and attach another chip. It all is best done several times on dead bodies before attempting a modification of the expensive target phone.

That's trivial for a machinist to check before starting the milling operation though.

Could even be automated if they have probes handy. :)

Yrs, as long as the milling machine is adequate. Hobby-level CNC devices may have harder time doing that, and pro / industrial devices cost many times the iPhone.

Fwiw, you can get a desktop CNC for a few hundred dollars (I mean they're very similar to 3d printers in design). You can get pretty good ones for under $5k.

But yeah, getting that chip off with just heat looks pretty hard without affecting anything else. I'd still want a heat sink to pull away heat from other parts but I'm not at this skill level and overly cautious. But this does look doable.

And since it's HN, I do encourage everyone to give more repair a go. Things like micro soldering are easier than you think. And remember than your phones can be turned into servers (raspberry pi? How about my old nexus?). Though I'd love to hear if people know how to do this stuff on iPhones because I plan on switching over. I guess no more bash scripting for automatic backup of all my photos and stuff to my server :'( someone please tell me there's a way )':

https://all3dp.com/1/best-cnc-router-desktop-cnc-machine/

> Though I'd love to hear if people know how to do this stuff on iPhones

Very little in the realm of "server" or "raspberry pi alternative" could be done with modern iPhones despite even a 2-year old iphone being OP in terms of hardware for most home server tasks. They really work hard to prevent any use besides what's officially blessed by Tim Apple himself. Whether that's "for your own good" or not is a matter of opinion, I happen to think it's lame but don't want to debate it.

I'm not too worried about old iPhones since by then it's pretty likely to be jail broken and no issues there. I mean even if I brick it (and somehow can't recover; so, very unlikely) it was going to be e-waste anyways, right? As far as recycling goes, turning your old phone into a server is a big win.

But I'm more interested in being able to use my current bash scripts that run on my Pixel. Backup is really the only important one since I can connect to my computers from anywhere to do anything else

Don’t count on that. There are still holes where certain iOS version ranges or iPhones to this day do not have a jailbreak available.

Good to know, but do you have more specific info? I see plenty of lists like this and I'm not quite sure what's missing from it.

https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Jailbreak

Can you still install Linux on them? That seems like what OP is actually looking for.

It's not exactly what I need but yeah, linux would be best.

But it does look like there is some success

https://konradybcio.pl/linuxona7/

Some of us do do this stuff with iPhones, and it’s do-able, sort of - TrollStore (available up to iOS 17.0 currently) + NewTerm/bootstrap gives you a native CLI, add Filza in there and you can do almost whatever you need (with some manual work). I must admit, it’s much easier/potentially more functional on iOS 16 and earlier, but what can you do…

Alternatively there is iSH or a-Shell.

I've been playing with iSH and aShell on my iPad. I'm not particularly happy with them and there seems to be a big lack of documentation (e.g. the `mount -t ios idintmatter dest` was quite odd and I think surprising to anyone that's terminally terminal)

Idk if I'll feel comfortable jailbreaking a new 16, but yeah apple is fucking weird.

  ==== Apple engineers, I know you're here ====

What the fuck guys? I want to throw a match case into my ssh config based on the SSID of the network I'm on (I can't rely on IP being static).

  - Airport
    Deprecated. 
  
  - networksetup
    Not associated with AirPort network

  - wdutil 
    Not only requires sudo, but you redact the SSID. To a root user‽‽‽
  
  - ioreg -ln Airport driver | perl -lne 'print $1 if $_ =~ /IO80211SSID.*"(.*)"/;'
    Redacted
 
  - system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | awk '/Current Network/ {getline;$1=$1;print $0 | "tr -d ':'";exit}' 
    Takes 10 seconds to run but at least it fucking works and doesn't require sudo!

       What
           The
              ᵃⁿᵈ ⁱ ᵈᵒⁿ'ᵗ ᵐᵉᵃⁿ ᵗʰⁱˢ ˡⁱᵍʰᵗˡʸ
                  FUCK
                      ‽‽‽

Seriously! What is going on here? Why are you __hostile__ to shell users‽ I don't know how to tell you that knowing the SSID of a machine that you already have access to is not a security risk. Seriously, what is going on here? I have a dozen ways to do this on Linux and you redact it with a sudo command but not with a user level command? Come on..... Have some balls and stand up to your bosses

Split horizon DNS can help you solve this for all services, not just ssh, and not be at the whims of Apple.

Thanks, I didn't know any this. I'll look into it more.

But I'm still just confused by the decisions being made over at Apple. I understand hand holding those who don't know much but they do realize that the reason their device is so common among engineers is because it's not too dissimilar from Linux, right? Why attack power users? What's being gained? That's what I don't get.

I long ago concluded that the overlap with Apple products and power tech user desires was a happy coincidence, and/or a hangover of their past, rather than an indication of their future.

The Mac is the exception in their current product lineup: every other platform is heavily locked down, and the user’s behaviour heavily restricted.

I strongly believe the Mac is heading in the same direction. See the progression from run what you want, to optional signing of binaries, to right click to run unsigned things, to disable a setting to be able to run unsigned binaries; or “worse”, the way spctl and csrutil no longer function after deploying Sequoia.

I mean I hate Windows more and that's the choice unfortunately. I'd love a Linux arm book though.

I do think part of the problem is not enough engineers asking their bosses why. Or not enough engineers thinking decisions through. I hope to god it's not a lack of engineers that are power users because that's even worse in many ways, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Try `ipconfig getsummary en0`. It's instant on my machine and dumps plenty of info about the current state of the connection, including the SSID and BSSID.

THANKS!!!!!! This works!

I have been amazed at how little information there is about this. Maybe I just don't know the right areas to look. But I tried google, reddit, stack, several LLMs[0] and never once did I come across ipconfig. Where should I be looking?

[0] Of course LLMs were just repeating the same stuff as reddit and SO and would continually forget that airplay got deprecated despite being in the prompt and me telling them multiple times after it suggested it over and over....

I use Windows, Mac, and Linux systems regularly, and frequently get ipconfig and ifconfig mixed up. So I was vaguely aware that both commands existed on macOS and your comment prompted me to try both to see if either exposed the SSID.

Makes sense. I'm mostly a Linux person myself, but strongly prefer a Mac laptop over a Windows laptop.

And for those that just want SSID, try either of these

  ipconfig getsummary en0 | grep -e '[^B]SSID' | cut -d " " -f5
  ipconfig getsummary en0 | grep -e '[^B]SSID' | sed -E 's/^.*: (.*)/\1/g'

Second will be better if your SSID has a space in it for some reason. You'll also be able to grab the domain name if you want it for similar reasons.

Yes you can but operating one CNC without major snafus takes some practice and selecting the proper bit and speeds for such a delicate operation isn't exactly easy. It is actually very easy to puncture the iPhone through and through.

Sure, but I don't think it is as hard as people make it out to be. It definitely is a tool you should not take lightly and use precaution with. But people act like vim or baking bread is really hard. Sure, mastery of them takes quite a long time, but ability to do at a competent level is more dependent on if one can read instructions than time or skill.

While technically it would be a CNC machine, desktop CNC are really just routers, and for most of them even soft materials like aluminium push them, requiring crazy spindle speeds for the tiny endmills they can handle due to the limited stiffness. And those high speeds create horrible fine metal dust

> And remember than your phones can be turned into servers

I wouldn't turn a cell phone into a server without also disabling the wireless chipsets somehow. Knowing that some unknown number of people working for your phone manufacturer, your wireless carrier, and Google or Apple have privileged access, including the the ability to remote into your phone at any time and add/delete/modify files and install software, without any notice or even indication to you that something has been done isn't the kind of security/privacy I'd want on a server.

I believe that this is actually possible, but I'm curious if there is there any hard evidence that it has ever been done?

It happens all the time on the OS/carrier/manufacturer side. I've personally seen settings reverted, software installed without notice, etc. It's a lot harder to say what any random cell tower in range is able to do but the chipsets are closed source and have their own OS.

Manufacturers and carriers have had it in their terms of service that they can do it.

Here's what tmobile had in their ToS:

We may remotely change software, systems, applications, features or programming on your Device without notice. These changes will modify your Device and may affect or erase data you have stored on your Device, the way you have programmed your Device, or the way you use your Device. You will not be able to use your Device during the installation of the changes, even for emergencies.

On a 5+ year old device that no longer has a data plan? T-Mobile's TOS doesn't apply during that time.

Plus, you know this is about software updates, right? It's generic but that's what it's about. Yes, upgrading means removing files at times as things get refactored or become obsolete, but they're not going to touch your main data, not that software isn't shitty and accidents happen.

For an android, you can always just flash the ROM. It's also very easy to remove physical devices like radio.

I'd also like some source on that deleting file part. These companies aren't spending money editing your software post security updates.

Meh, I replaced the battery in a 1st gen (2016) iphone SE, per the ifixit instructions. The home pushbutton didn't work afterwards. Repeated disassembly and reassembly didn't help. No useful advice on ifixit forum. Unclear what if anything to try next. Luckily the phone was long obsolete by then, so replaced. Repairability of these things sucks and I miss swappable batteries.

> Repairability of these things sucks and I miss swappable batteries.

They become mandatory in the EU after 2027 so I expect them to make a strong comeback at some point.

The EU requirement is pretty weak and it basically says you can take the phone apart and replace the battery without iphone-like hassle levels. So when the battery reaches EOL, you can order a new battery and do the repair yourself at home. What I miss is being able to swap batteries whenever you feel like it, with no tools, like you would with a flashlight. That means you don't have to mess with power banks or worry about your phone's charge level. Just carry a spare, charged battery with you. I'm old enough to remember when basically all mobile phones were like that.

With only hot air you would need a lot of heat and pulling, potentially displacing other parts nearby, because it seems like the nand flash is not just soldered, but additionally glued with some kind of adhesive.

> Perhaps he did it because heat gun would have impacted other parts of the PCB

Most of all the components on the other side of the PCB.

Even if the NAND was not additionally covered in resin, due to the large amount of contacts (and probably large amount of grounded pins, which dissipate heat faster), alot of heat would be needed. More than the smaller components underneath need to just fall off then...

The components underneath shouldn't fall off. The surface tension of the solder should be enough to keep them in place. (That's how it's generally possible to reflow solder components to two sides of a board.)

Of course, reflowing the components in an ad-hoc way is quite likely to cause other problems, so it's probably still a good idea to avoid it.

CNC grinding part is so wild, it took my several replay to understand what is that

I wouldn't have thought to do it, but after seeing it, i think I could do this on a Bridgeport. I'm only so-so at machining, but I can make a Bridgeport grind with great precision in a rectangle!

I was actually thinking the same thing; a maintained milling machine can easily grind at those tolerances. Get your Z level be the most important so you don't cut too deep into the solder pads.

The being said, I'm wondering if he used something like a cheap SainSmart CNC... sounded like a dentist drill

Even so, the solder pads are surely at least like 0.05 to 0.1mm thick, across the size of the 2cm chip that shouldn't be hard at all to get level enough

If you visit cities in China that are heavily invested in the electronics industry you could buy a cheaper iPhone 16 pro with 128GB and upgrade it to 1TB.

But if you do that regularly, you probably have the money to buy the 1TB version outright.

make a friend there or friends with a booth worker and just ship it there talk over wechat shipping cost quite low

there should be an audio socket hidden somewhere, you can open it by drilling a hole.... (old joke)

hahaha yeah

Inb4 someone does it on a 4jaw chuck in a lathe

> Disconnect dozens of cables and parts – wow, it's going to be hard to remember how everything goes back together

We didn’t invent writing, drawing, and photographing for nothing.

1. Have small storage boxes numbered 1 through 1000.

2. Before and after detaching anything, take photos (multiple, if needed)

3. Draw arrow/circle/… indicators on the photos to help you remember what to look at.

4. Whatever comes loose, put it in the next labeled box.

5. Take a photo of the filled box and the tool(s) you used to detach that part.

6. When putting things back together, work backwards through your photos.

we live in the future, just start recording video of everything. You probably have an old cellphone you could use, and you'll wish you had more angles if you do end up being to go back into the footage for something

I don't think a GoPro can focus close enough to take detailed enough pictures of tiny components like these.

okay, edited to say old cellphone

Doesn't really adress the basic problem, most old phones (and many new phones) don't have the sort of macro autofocus you'd need to keep a video recording at a high enough fidelity to keep track of millimetre-sized objects. Looking at various youtubers, even with semi-professional gear it can be a multi-second struggle to focus on much larger pieces of mechanical devices.

Do that for 20-30 steps and you need an assistant or two to not lose track of what you're doing, and spend an hour in post editing out all the times you side tracked fighting the camera.

I think that would make it a multi-person job. Keeping the relevant part in focus while you’re manipulating the device distracts from figuring out what to do next.

> Disconnect dozens of cables and parts – wow, it's going to be hard to remember how everything goes back together.

It's not going to be hard. You won't even need to note where everything goes. The sizes of the cables/parts are different and as a result you'll be able to match them up.

> CNC grind the existing 128GB NAND to dust – I should probably stop watching now...

Ah yes, Apple, the king of repairability!

Now do the ram inside an M1+ SoC

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