The specialists at iBoff, Malaysian repairers, have just posted a video that shows two interesting operations. The first is the update of a 2019 MacBook Pro, to go from 16 GB of RAM, its initial configuration, to 64 GB of RAM. The manipulation is not as trivial as in a simple PC and required several steps, the main one of which was to find the reference of RAM chips used by Apple. Indeed, the MacBook Pro in question only integrates 16 chips and the rare 64 GB DDR4 RAM kits in SO-DIMM contain 32. But by analyzing a MacBook Pro equipped with 64 GB at the factory (an option that Apple offered), they found the reference of the components to perform the manipulation.
Updating the RAM of a MacBook Pro.
As is often the case with MacBook Pros, you have to disassemble a good part of the Mac, unsolder the original chips and replace them with the 4 GB chips from Micron, before modifying a resistor to indicate to the system that the amount of RAM has been modified. Complicated manipulations, but accessible for experienced repairers.
For Apple Silicon Macs, it is much more complicated. Repairers show that the change is very difficult and that they do not perform the manipulation, for a good reason: the risks of destroying the motherboard are high. In Apple Silicon chips (and especially in models based on M1, M2 and M3), the RAM chips are placed literally on the system on chip, and their attempts to unsolder the RAM have ended in failure: the necessary heat spreads into the different layers of the motherboard and towards the system on chip, too close. They show a technique that consists of literally destroying the RAM chips with a laser, but above all recommend choosing the amount of RAM carefully when purchasing and favoring the latter over storage, which they can update more easily after purchase.
This motherboard equipped with an M1 chip did not appreciate the attempt.
