Apple’s M1 Mac lineup, whether it’s the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro or in some cases, even the Mac mini, are notoriously difficult to upgrade in any way — and if you do, you’re almost certainly voiding the laptop’s warranty.
According to MacRumors, technicians in Guangzhou, China, have found a way to detach RAM and SSD chips from Apple’s M1-based Macs, allowing them to be updated with more powerful and higher-capacity parts.
For example, if you purchased the M1 MacBook Air and 8GB of RAM wasn’t enough, you could upgrade it to 16GB. The report says that macOS even recognizes these homemade upgrades as official Apple parts.
Chinese maintenance engineers can already expand the capacity of the Apple M1. The 8GB memory has been expanded to 16GB, and the 256GB hard drive has been expanded to 1TB. pic.twitter.com/2Fyf8AZfJR
— DuanRui (@duanrui1205) April 4, 2021
The process is, of course, far from straightforward and involves removing chips that are soldered onto the laptop’s motherboard and replacing them with difficult-to-find parts. As you may have already guessed, the process also void’s the device’s warranty.
On the plus side, this hopefully indicates that future M1 Macs like the inevitable new Mac Pro, for example, will still be upgradable despite being powered by Apple’s own ARM-based silicon.
On another note, while I had several issues with the M1 MacBook Pro when it first launched, the experience is very smooth now. Nearly all of the apps I use daily, including Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, Audition CC and even Edge, all have dedicated M1-based apps.
Even the monitor flickering issue I dealt with for several weeks disappeared when I purchased an official Apple A/V adapter.
Source: MacRumors, @duanrui1205
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