M-series MacBook SSD storage upgrade (non-official) [video] | Hacker News Reader

M-series MacBook SSD storage upgrade (non-official) [video]

youtube.com

18 pointsgessha16 comments

This rocks. I wonder how much it would end up costing for random idevice repair shops to make this upgrade to apple devices, especially if they can scavenge the existing NAND chips.

Also wondering how and if apple could detect this and break it in a software update. (or hardware update, by packing more things close to the NANDs so there's no space for this)

Apple really is into the game of upselling us on iCloud. To them there are no incentives to give us bigger SSDs at a reasonable price since they just want to lock us into their service that has a recurring price.

I think there is a little bias here from power users. I rarely see any non power users gobbling up storage in large quantities. In fact 256Gb is probably the most common I have seen in the last 10 years and there's aways at least 80-100gb free for most people even on machines that have had several windows versions go through them.

Not sure what the iCloud point is. I don't use it other than for stuff I want to share between my iPad and my Mac. It's not required and to use it as overspill storage is a stupid idea. And as for my Mac I've got a 512Gb one and it has 268Gb free still. That contains everything I have ever done on a computer from 1984 to date, every photo I have ever taken, every bit of code I've written.

Now the pricing I agree is shit but if it's a really a problem, my usual advice to people is to tidy your shit up, stop hoarding stuff and stop moaning about it.

That might be true if people don't have an iPhone but the moment you start taking photos and videos you're on a trajectory towards one day reaching that limit and get stuck having for only choice to upgrade your iCloud account for more space.

Exactly. It’s almost impossible to not hit the free 5GB limit and get nagged to death about it being full.

There’s really no easy way to offload data off Apple devices unless you pay for third party apps, again contributing revenue to App Store. This is why my primary computing device is and will never be an Apple device.

Kudos for something that I wish existed before I bought my M3.

FWIW, with the re-introduced SD card slot and slimline SD holders, you can easily add 512GB to 1TB of decent-speed attached storage for larger files/backups/source, etc.

I like this solution here, however, as buying a base-level 256GB MBP will probably make up for the cost of the post-purchase surgery.

It looks like their store is here: https://www.tindie.com/stores/iboffrcc/

A rough demo of what a different model looks like: https://iboffrcc.com/pages/-guide-solder-nvme-to-your-macboo...

From what I can see, they rescue PCIe signals from the existing NAND controller.

> slimline SD holders

Any recommendations, anyone?

Edit: Looks like the Internet and mmastrac generally recommend the BASEQI adapter[1]. For built-in storage, the Transcends are pretty popular.

1. https://www.amazon.com/BASEQI-Aluminum-microSD-Adapter-MacBo...

BASEQI worked for me. The model numbers and support matrix are a bit confusing, but I've had it in my M3 for ~5-6 months with only one time the SD card didn't appear to be mounted after a reboot. Zero unintended ejections.

Looks like a hack rather than a bit of sound engineering. From a mechanical perspective it might work for a bit but thermal cycling on that board-board mating will probably kill this dead. You need to make sure that both parts have the same coefficient of thermal expansion. That's a big problem with ceramic substrate BGAs already which have I think around a 5000 cycle lifespan to the point they are moving to plastic ones which are closer.

This succeeds in reducing reliability, nothing more.

I'm not saying these things shouldn't have replaceable SSDs for reference, just this is not the right solution.

TL;DW: The video doesn't show how they did this "hack".

A lot of it is spent talking about how the battery won't charge or the laptop won't boot if this removable storage is removed.

It seems like they've just made a board to route all the NAND modules' pins to a connector, and then another board to go back again. There don't seem to be any electronics on the boards other than the modules and a few resistors.

Probably a BGA footprint on the holder board. So PCB-PCB bond. So much nope in that!

I saw as more of a "look, this can be done without impacting speed - Apple, just do it" kind of video. Which is why I thought they didn't speak to the how.

Since the competition can now offer as good battery life as Macs with the introduction of the Snapdragon X, I don't care so much about the bad Apple practices (regarding RAM, SSD, ports).

Performance seems quite poor in Efficiency mode and Efficiency seems quite poor in performance mode. https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/s/hgwjlsjXIW

Seems like AMD is closer.

tin contacts for an ssd module? it will be funny once oxidation kicks in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com