hey there Apple in case you didn't know this is an SSD normally users can swap
these to repair or upgrade their computers but according to some articles
we've found online there is no way to swap the SSD on the new expensive Mac
Studio of course the truth is a little
bit more complicated than that and in fact there are some reports that you can
in fact swap out the SSD in the Mac Studio so naturally I shelled out thank
you o nearly $3,000 for a second one so we could test
it out for you because I mean like there's no way that Apple would do
something this anti-consumer would they no never I mean especially not months
after that big splash about repairability right that would be crazy
it would be crazy just like it would be crazy to tell you about our sponsor
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below naturally before we begin we have to get our Mac Studio opened up so is
that it great paper packaging though I love that I love this little
spring-loaded box at the bottom it's made completely out of cardboard they're
packaging it Engineers are super cool I'm not going to go through this too
much with you guys you can get it with the M1 Max you can get it with the M1
Pro you can get it with the M1 Ultra it's got Thunderbolt 4 it's got USB type
a 10 gig Ethernet HDMI out of course
DisplayPort over Thunderbolt you got USB and SD card reader at the front and
it comes with a power cable that is check this out fully removable wow
that's a feature now look at that oh it's kind of an antifeature cuz now I
can't lift up my computer by a power cord without it falling down oh we
should have done it the monitor way this has been covered to death so I'm not going to harp on it too much but getting
into the Mac Studio is a bit of a pain in the butt they could have put the
screw somewhere accessible but instead they're under a little rubber foot that
you're going to have to bung up in order to get at them what's the best way to
get under this stupid thing so it looks like there's there's a spot that you can
get under see like right here oh look at that there's a specific spot I hear a
lot of arguments for why Apple should be protective of its products making sure
that only qualified Personnel work on them but a lot of those arguments become
completely invalid when you consider that you wouldn't need to be specially
qualified if they didn't have special bull that you need to know in order to
open it this is a problem that Apple engineered thanks Apple I haven't
actually other than popping in on Anthony while he was shooting ShortCircuit looked at the inside I always
tend to try to sequester myself when there's a big new release that I haven't
had a chance to see in person yet have I lost a screw already that's okay I'll
just be able to order a replacement easily from Apple
got to give credit they've got style matte black pcbs all the time wait are
these they're they're completely different wait what oh wa did we just
discover that there are different revisions of the Mac Studio power supply
are these the exact same skew I thought so you double check yeah what the crap
these are completely different pcbs this is not just Apple sourced from two
different factories this is different
construction techniques even oh interesting this one says light on power
technology and this is from Delta so if I had to guess I think what probably
happened is Apple put out for qualifying designs from multiple vendors as you
would because you want to get competitive quotes you never just get one quote they got multiple validated
designs and instead of just choosing one
they're dual sourcing right from the start which if I had to guess I would
say because this isn't going to be an especially high volume product compared
to something like say an iPhone is just making sure that by having two sources
their supply is less likely to be interrupted by random covid shutdowns or
whatever else the case may be fascinating okay I confirmed it they're
exactly the same specs uh which ones which oh mine has the Shmo okay cuz
they're probably knowing Apple they're probably chipped to should we switch the
power supplies screw it we might as well we might as well why don't we just start
with that I I'm not even going to keep disassembling it for now I'm just going
to install this and see if it'll boot let's find out if you can switch your power supply I mean that's what the
people want to know right that's why we're here doing what Apple could easily
document and tell us but
don't oh Alex yeah what's going on what
do you mean what is this PC monitor where's my studio monitor if you
want I can go grab it look how long this power cord is Alex that's a DisplayPort
cable well I could plug it in at any distance I wanted who needs it look at
that confirmed you can swap between the two
different models of power supply now this is where Anthony
rightfully got really excited during his tear down on ShortCircuit because it
was almost immediately obvious that Apple has not one but two SSD slots
including one that's unpopulated that's kind of cool check this out they're
doing power here so all your data pins will
definitely be connected before power supplied to the drive that's pretty sick
actually before we go much further there's one other bit of speculation we'd like to put to rest some users
online observed that their SSD was in the right slot and wouldn't work anymore
if they moved it over to the left leading them to think that maybe this
chip right here was an SSD controller or somehow integral to the functioning of
the SSD but you can see that our unit in fact both of our units have the SSD
installed on the left and there's no chip down here so my guess would be that
this has more to do with the front iio and less to do with the ssds because as
we know Apple puts their SSD controllers directly on their M1 so so these are
going to be wired up directly to the S so I got to give myself credit for
nailing that this wasn't an SSD before I think anyone else did I was on W show
right after I had checked out Anthony's ShortCircuit and I was like I don't see a controller or Dam on there that's
right ladies and gentlemen we've got four Nan flash packages and that's all
she wrote which is probably actually why it has two slots in the first place
because in order to hit that 8 terabytes of capacity they're going to need yeah
at least eight packages with current technology as far as I'm aware Hey
where's that Sabin uh 8 tab SSD yes confirmed Sabin is using eight packages
to hit 8 terab so that's probably why we haven't seen any loaded with two already
because the 8 tab one is so expensive and not too many people are going to be ordering it and ripping it open enough
about that though ready to do an SSD
swap unlike our power supplies everything about our flash storage
modules appears to be identical other than the colors of tape that we put on
them so I'm expecting this to go off without a hitch as long as Apple didn't
lock it but I want to talk in a bit more depth about why I called this a flash
storage module rather than an SSD an SSD
has three main components flash storage so those are the chips right there you
can see the analoges right there between the two often a dam cache though that's
not a given and a controller but apple
is conspicuously missing both a cach and a controller that's because Apple moved
this from the SSD so this is not a full SSD onto their M1 silicon and there are
a number of good reasons to do this security performance and perhaps most
importantly cost one of these controllers is going to be a couple of
dollars on every single unit putting it in the Silicon of the die means it is
now pennies now in the long ago past allocating diarrhea to anything other
than compute and connectivity would have been Unthinkable but over time as trans
resistors have continued to shrink and especially now as modular and chiplet
Designs are becoming more and more popular adding a little bit of die area
for something like an SSD controller isn't as much of a problem and it's very
clear that apple does not care how large
their die gets for their M1 silicon what this means though is that we can't think
of these things as ssds and it makes
sense that you can't just willy-nilly swap the flash storage around because
you also cannot do that on a regular SSD
because unlike a hard drive bits are not stored in any kind of sequential fashion
and only the controller knows where every zero and one is supposed to be
however there should be no reason that changing out the SSD and completely
formatting it fresh shouldn't work so let's go ahead and proceed one nice
thing is that it looks like these little I would have initially thought they're
thermal pads but now I'm feeling like they're more Emi Shields they're still
sticky which means I should be able to just reuse it very nice love it I love
that I don't have to like basically reassemble this thing at all in order to
test it uh you should probably uh put the other bit of the cage in there first
uh fine I'll put that in ah it's probably fine yeah it's fine could I
just get a see of like A4 paper or something well it's not on so oh is it
not I see lights flashing inside yes it's saying SOS oh it's mad oh right cuz
I swapped to the SSD yeah oh balls you'd think there would be something on screen
instead of just flashing a red thing I mean they clearly know what the problem is there's a there's a blink code here
yeah and in the past they actually had recovery environments so you could you
know reflash all of the stuff on here it would just connect to the internet in
the recovery environment do all the stuff for you you can't anymore oh why
it's a great question so what do you do well you have to read this little
document here and use another Mac you have to have another Mac to restore your
Mac you have to have another Mac it's infuriating it's like the way Apple
treats their customers oh you didn't buy enough of our products
well that was creepy with accurate yeah like I'm their customer aren't am I not
oh you're not not a real customer plug
the Mac computers together with a supported USBC cable what supported USBC
cable does it have to be an apple one or what I don't think so please tell me
there's no BS chip in it they really put the fu in dfu mode the fact you have to
own a second magc to do this it will take a little while for this to fully
you know install the OS well that's perfect cuz I have a conference call
right now but wait that means we've made it at least as far as that swapping it
worked 100% of the time for us yeah so unlike the people who said that they did
have difficulty with some of their swaps we managed a 100% success rate sample
size of two yep okay VB
we're back and it worked it sort of worked oh it didn't work and then I did
it again exactly the same way and then it worked oh okay well It ultimately
worked which answers one question which is can you change out your SSD if due to
a a defect or whatever else and the answer is yes but it still leaves one
question pending what if you wanted to upgrade say go from 512 gigs to
4 terab if you can swap two 512 gig
modules then surely nothing would prevent you from putting in a larger one
would it let's find out that's interesting I had said that I thought
power was being delivered via these two bands right here and I had said oh
that's such a cool design power's not connected until it's plugged all the way
in I was wrong about that it looks like those are both just for grounding and
since they're not hot swappable there'd be no reason to care about power not being connected until later anyway so
just want to correct that are you ready
theoretically this is a 1 tab Mac Studio now well you probably need to do the
whole dfu thing again uh well you know sure let's just let's just see maybe
it'll magically work it didn't wait will this work shouldn't if this works that's
kind of awesome that means third parties would be able to make these flash
modules conceivably and you could actually have cheap SSD upgrades that
would be awesome flash module upgrades well it's an SSD upgrade if you update
the flash of an SSD installing system holy
crap holy crap is this going to work did
we already talk about how uh Scotty from strange Parts managed to change out the
flash on an iPhone like oh yeah and it just detected it he just plugged it in
to a restore and it worked which shows you that even with all of Apple really
so even with Apple's s
so security things that they do like on
iPhones this works but they
specifically go out of their way to prevent you from doing it on the Mac
Studio now technically we have not tried
just putting a higher capacity single module in it's possible that might work
has anyone tried that yet other people have tried it and it's never worked
unreal because you know Apple has the tools to change this right there is
absolutely no way that Apple produces
these main boards and hard loocks them
forever to a particular capacitive flash
module in fact the fact that there is no
logic on the flash module is even less
reason for this to be locked down in any way because the actual controller any
any security reason that they might provide for doing this is all on the so
anyway they're just flash it's just ones
and zeros I was almost ready to be
impressed now I'm just super pissed off
and you should be too whether you're an Apple customer or not an Apple customer
this kind of crap affects you because as Apple does so does the rest of the
industry you know what's particularly cool about this um nothing you know like
the 980 Pro how much do you think it is to go from half a terabyte to a terabyte
I don't know like 40 bucks 50 bucks it's 80 bucks for them how much do you think
it is for apple on this I don't know $150 $200
$200 and that is why apple does not want you
upgrading your own flash module that and you those are the only two reasons man
in researching this I read some of the worst possible takes you know you got
people talking about how well the M1 is architect different and that's why they
need to do it this way as though Apple didn't design it from the ground up as
though Apple had a gun to their head that they have to design it like this
there's nothing else to do Apple locks it through firmware there's no reason
they have to do that but they do it anyway and unless their customers make a
great big stink about it they're just going to keep on doing this kind of
thing by the way when I say they customers I mean me too I just bought
two Mac Studios am I not a customer tell you who you should be a customer of our
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