Apple has made it increasingly difficult to repair and upgrade Macs. Fifteen years ago, it was possible to replace both the RAM and storage in all machines. Today this only works (officially) in the Mac Pro.
The SSD circuits have long been soldered to the motherboard in the various MacBook models, and with the launch of the M1 Macs, Apple went a step further and placed the memory on the same board as the processor. It stands to reason, therefore, that it’s now impossible to replace either component, whether you want to upgrade or perform repairs.
But on Chinese social media, the news is now being shared that engineer Yang Changshun in Guangzhou (via MacRumors) has managed to upgrade the RAM in the base model of MacBook Air from 8GB to 16GB, and the SSD storage from 256GB to 1TB.
The procedure is highly complicated and requires extreme care, as the memory circuits must be removed without damaging the bracket or the processor that’s located right next to it.
This will probably never be feasible for the average Mac owner. We do not believe that Apple itself will offer either upgrades or repairs of individual components; as before, it’s far more likely to offer a complete motherboard replacement if storage or memory breaks down. But MacRumors writes that there is already speculation that Chinese workshops will offer upgrades.
Remember that you don’t need to do internal upgrades to expand your storage. Check out our guide to the best external SSD drives for Mac, where you’ll find a bevy of recommendations.
This article originally appeared on Macworld Sweden. Translation by David Price.