Apple silicon is so good that even diehard Windows users are turning to
Mac. Even the prices are shockingly competitive these days. That is as long
as you choose the starting at configuration. See, the thing is, when
it comes to upgrading the base config, Apple quite literally values their
memory and storage chips higher than gold by weight, which wouldn't be as
much of a problem if you could just buy it now and then wait for prices to fall
and upgrade after the fact. But unfortunately, because Apple solders
these components to the mainboard, even in their desktops, now that is no longer
possible. Or is it? We'll get to that in a moment. First, I want to acknowledge
that soldering down components is not inherently bad. For system memory, the
signal loss from longer traces and especially from passing through a
connector is so great that particularly
the GPU and Apple's latest silicon could have its performance significantly
impacted by using modules. Now, some manufacturers might make different
choices and they might choose modules over cutting edge performance, but Apple
didn't, and neither of those choices is wrong. With that said, for storage,
there is no technical reason that it needs to be soldered. To be clear, I'm
not saying you could just plunk any PC SSD into your Mac and expect it to work.
Apple's approach to storage does think differently, with the biggest difference
being that their storage controller is integrated directly into the CPU rather
than into the SSD like on this M.2 stick. This offers the advantage of
hardware level encryption through their secure enclave that prevents the storage
from being accessed outside of the system it's paired with. But as Apple's
own designs reveal, nan storage is an order of magnitude slower than RAM and
there is no performance penalty for mounting it to a modular card as Apple
tacitly admits by doing just that in the Mac Studio and the latest M4 Mac Mini.
So why then does Apple solder their storage? One, it's the way they've done
it since the first iPhone. And habits are just so gosh darn hard to break. And
two, money. Well, you know what? I'm not
giving up on my money today. And I'm all about breaking bad habits. And I'm going
to do it with some help from Colin.
Colin is the host of Doss Dude 1. We're going to have his channel linked down
below. And he is master of the dark art
of upgrading non-upgradeable Macs. Today I'm going to show Lionus here how to
actually perform these upgrades. And if he does well enough, I'll even let him
try on one of his own machines himself. It's going to be awesome. Just like this
awesome segue to our sponsor, Delta Hub. Pick up a unique LT edition Carpio and
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Let's get started. Whoa, whoa, whoa. First, we're going to need some tools to
get this job done. This is quite complicated, as you know. Here we've got
a hot air station. We need a decent soldering iron, some solder paste,
solder wick, and miscellaneous stuff like that. Some BGA stencils for the
nans, this underfill removal tool with its little attachments here. And last
thing in the list here is a preheater, which just makes uh the job a little bit
easier. I mean, everything here is something that I could easily obtain for
myself. You're obviously highly experienced doing this, but is there any
reason that someone couldn't watch this video, follow the same steps as us, and
perform the same operation? Certainly, with enough practice, one could
certainly do that. I'll show everything that's needed to be done here. It does
take skill. It does take a lot of practice. So, you absolutely absolutely
need to practice before you attempt something like this. Maybe on something dead. Yes, something dead. Absolutely.
Cool. We don't have to worry about that, though, because Colin is going to be
doing our first upgrade on my M2 MacBook
Air from the 30-day Apple challenge. I specifically ordered this with just 256
gigs of storage cuz I knew he was going to come help me fix it. And what's even
better is that the 256 gig configuration
comes with only a single NAND chip. So,
when you upgrade the storage, you also upgrade the bandwidth, which is pretty
sick. Uh, by the way, that doesn't apply to the M3 and newer. They ended up
backtracking on that whole design decision. So, you know, you actually
made my life a whole lot more difficult by opting for that 256 gig config. Uh,
because in addition to having the NAN chip omitted, they also omitted about 50
components on the board, support components for that second NAN chip that
I also have to reinstall. Oh, cool. Question for you. How hard is it to get
your hands on a the NAND for these upgrades and also those support
components? Yeah. So, the nans are more difficult obviously than the support
components, but those can be easily purchased off AliExpress. You just have
to know which ones you need for your specific system. Uh some sellers make it
a little bit easier by uh going by the systems themselves, but that's not
common. But the support components can be obtained from any uh parts
distributor such as Mouser or Digi Key. Mouser and DigiKey aren't exactly known
for their affordability. Is this going to make more sense than just buying the
higherend config in the first place? Oh, 100% it will because even at the worst
case scenario, the upgrade cost is usually about half price, including a
labor charge, which someone like me would charge if you were to send it in.
Have you ever used our precision kit before? I have not yet, but I do have
one that I will be using soon. Okay. Well, I'm not going to bias your first impressions then. I'll let you just do
your thing. When you take these apart, it's a little bit difficult to get the bottom off, but what I find is if you
stick a bit in there and kind of just pry it out like this. Oh. Gives you a
good entry point. And then you can take this and pop the clips. Oh, brilliant. I
guarantee you we won't include little details like that. But what we might do
is have an exclusive LMG.gg/flowplane
where we have the more in-depth step by step of stuff that realistically you can
follow any guide how to disassemble a MacBook. We'll stay focused on the stuff
that is unique to the NAND upgrades. Now, we've got uh this shield/ heat sink
that's on here we have to remove. And that is also held on by some T3s. And
this shield is kind of a pain to remove. It's very easy to bend. You don't want
to bend it. And you're quite certain I'm gonna be able to do the second one. Uh,
you should be able to. The second one, uh, should be a lot easier than this
one. Oh, I see what you're saying because, you know, I've only ever done
one BGA replacement operation and the board didn't live. And the guy who
helped me with it now hates me. That's my track record. Okay. Looking a little
grim here, but we'll we'll get there. Now, I should note that this thermal
paste here is special goopy black thermal paste, as you can see. Um, you
do not want to remove and replace this when you work on these M2 MacBook Airs.
leave it alone and just reinstall it with the thermal paste already applied.
There's nothing aftermarket that could be better than it. So, there is one
product. It's called Carbon Black made by TCRS Circuit up near LA in
California. He's actually a good friend of mine. If you can get some of that,
you can replace this. But nothing else that exists is suitable to replace this
paste. So, if I put a shim and I put
liquid metal on it, it wouldn't be No, don't don't put liquid metal on this.
That's an awful awful idea. I did. I'm saying theoretically. theoretically like
is it the performance that's so good or what's so good about it? When you use
liquid thermal paste that is only suitable with pressure mounted heat
sinks. So if they have springs or some sort of pressure that holds them against
the chip, that is the only case in which you can use a liquid thermal paste. That
makes sense because this is not a pressure-mounted heat sink. Apple came
up with their custom-designed uh carbon-based black thermal paste that
just smooshes out but retains its uh goopiness. It doesn't like thin out like
liquid paste does, right? And it allows it to maintain contact with the SOC. Now
is the part where we'll begin the removal process of the original NAN.
Okay. And I guess now is a good time to point out why it's not possible to do a
similar upgrade on the memory. You can see here that it is integrated directly
onto the package. It is technically possible to desolder and replace these
chips. However, due to the bonding material used uh between these chips and
the actual SOC itself, you cannot effectively remove those without causing
damage to both the chips and the SOC. To begin the removal, I actually do it flat
on the silicone mat. When you use a preheater, you cause a lot of extra risk
in hitting the components around it. Got it. You want to try to concentrate the
heat on the end only. So, our preheater is only for when we apply the new one.
It's for rework and um reinstalling the new chips. Correct. Out of a couple
dozen pairs of tweezers, you picked this particular set. How do you decide which
tweezers are good? When you're working with such components as O21's, you want
very precise tweezers. A lot of times, what I do is I take and try to pick up
the entire board by one of its components. And the easier you can do
that, the more precise the tweezers are. To get started here, I'm going to start
by removing the underfill around the edges of the nand. I'm going to start
with 280 for this one because uh you have to judge that based on the thermal
mass of the board. So, since this is a pretty small and thin board, uh, it'll
have a little bit lower thermal mass than some larger, thicker boards. So,
this part's not too scary. This isn't scary. We're just going to basically take this excess underfill that's
squeezed out the edges of the chip and scrape it away. Basically, becomes
brittle with heat. So, the more you heat it, the easier it will be to remove.
350. Yeah. So, at 350, you're getting into uh solder melting temperatures,
which you don't really want at this stage, but sometimes you got to flakes
off nicely there. This looks like a fancy pants X-acto knife. What is it? It
is an underfill removal tool designed specifically for what I'm doing. Uh you
might notice on the board here that there's not really much room to get this
under here. Yeah. And for this specific board, I like to take away these two
capacitors. Just remove them temporarily to get room for my tool to slide under
the chip. I'm starting to become deeply uncomfortable with the fact that it's my
turn next. Don't worry, yours will be a lot easier than this. What are the odds
you like brick my thousand computer? Um, since I've practiced enough on dead
boards, I've never messed one up ever before. Really? Yep. So, this would be
the first time. This would be the first time if if such a thing were to happen.
If it were to happen, which it won't. And we're just looking for the solder to turn shiny so that we can tell that it's
able to be removed. What did we just set it to? 380. 380 for the final removal of
the chip. And this time, we've got a different blade on our little X-acto
knife here. And we're just going to slide that under. And what? Just lift it
off. What I'm going to use this for is sliding it under the chip. And then
we're going to get it under there and just push it off the board. Okay. So,
the thing that I just said, but more words.
A good rule of thumb with this is when you stick this under here, it should
feel like a cold knife through butter. So, if it's any more difficult than
that, you're not fully molten under there. That's an expression I've not
heard before. Here it is. Cold knife through butter time. Woo. Okay. Now, you
flipped that up really fast. Is there any risk if you didn't have full flow
that you could like rip a pad off if you were to do that move? Yes, but I made
sure it was fully, you know, moving before I did that. Got it. So, once it
was fully loose, I just kind of flipped it up and out of the way. I need to uh
remove all this underfill. And in order to do that, uh the solder has to be
molten as well as uh the underfill brittle enough that I can scrape it
away. And you do these kinds of upgrades on like Steam Decks and basically
anything that has soldered RAM or storage. Like you said, Steam Decks. I
mainly do Apple stuff. I do like to work on the Apple stuff. Now, I know that
Apple has in the past had issues with like hardware pairing of, you know, the
nan chip and the SOC. Was there any preparation process that we had to do
before we just ripped this off and put a new nan chip on there? Nope. So, the new
nans I have are brand new nans that are blank with no firmware on them? And once
we install them onto this board, the DFU
restore process will program them appropriately. Very cool. And this can
just be discarded, I guess, then because no one would want a 256 GB NAN chip.
Yes, exactly. You asked for this. Now you have it. I need to use that to uh
hold the board. Pull it out a little bit like that. Mhm. As you can see here,
there is a bit of solder mask damage. And that was simply because I think
these underfill tools are made of some sort of different material than the ones
I'm used to, and they're a lot sharper, so they kind of dig in a little bit
easier. Okay. Um, in an ideal world, you don't want any of that. Uh we might have
to go back and fix it, but uh I don't think so. How do we fix that? Uh you use
that stuff, that solder mask right there, and you basically put it on there
on in those areas, and then you scrape, uh the pad area away. Okay. Well,
hopefully we don't have to do that. We'll find out real quick here if the solder mask issue is going to be an
issue. Right now, we're just reballing these or what. Uh I'm just tinning them
up to prepare to uh actually remove all the solder. Oh. Um, and it's easier to
add leaded solder to it and then remove it than just to remove the straight lead
free solder. And we use leaded solder because it's just plain gosh darn easier
to work with. Way easier to work with. Like there's no comparison. But we also
support the use of lead free solder in industry because there's less lead in
it. Okay. Those all look like they tinned up pretty nicely. Yep. And the
solder mask damage is not deep enough to cause any issues at all. Uh if if it
did, you'd see the solder I just put on there uh stick to those parts. I'm a
little surprised cuz we can see the copper color, but we haven't gone all
the way down to the bare metal. Yep. Wonderful. And again, I don't do that
usually. Right. So, now we're using a solder wick. Yes. Solder wick. Radar
station out of 10. I'd say it's a good nine out of 10. Eight. Eight and a half.
Nine out of 10. It's a lot better than my setup. So, you know, I can only say
so much. Now, we're reflexing to put those caps back on. Yep. I'm going to
reinstall those real quick here. Oh, is there a reason we do those first instead
of doing the NAND first? Um, it doesn't really matter. I could do them after.
Pro tip, make sure you put them on the right way. Hey, and how do you make the judgment call whether to put new solder
or reuse the original solder? Um, it
just depends. Uh, if it's a small component, I'll always replace the solder because it's so hard to get them
to actually stick. But with something big like these capacitors, I'm just
going to use what it's got. Now we need to deal with uh all these pads here for
the extra components that we have to install. Yes. Um so first I'm going to
put some flux on them. And for these I am going to retin them all with lead
leted solder. As a late 30some I think the most remarkable part of this for me
is watching him do this without any magnification or assists. I see you've
obtained from laptop schematics.com
Apple schematics. Apple doesn't you know provide these do they? No they don't.
They don't. Uh, but I acquired it. I need it for this job and uh we're going
to use it to get all these components installed. Eat a apple. So, if you take
a look at this schematic here, uh, some of the components, you can see all this
row of decoupling capacitors right here. Uh, these 0.1 microfarad 2.2. I just
omit those. Uh, I do install a couple of them like these 20 microfarads here. Um,
and then same here. I just kind of omit all these smaller value ones. And
that'll still provide enough decoupling for this nan to work effectively.
engineer who designed this would probably be cringing right now as I'm
saying this, but uh just due to time constraints and just the immense tedious
nature of doing this, they're just going to be emitted. It works just fine. I
start out with the uh top here. PP1V25 awake NAND. Yeah. So, this is power,
right? Yep. One of the three power rails that each NAND requires that resistor
RN10 O21s. Very small. Uh-huh. And for
these, we only need one. Thank god. And
how do you tell the difference between that and random debris on your pad? You
can see the little shiny parts of it. Find the component that I probably just
got stuck to the bottom of my hand. Yep,
there it is.
This is ridiculous. It's double the size of 0105s. They use those on iPhones.
Cool. How do you check if you did it right? So, I just look at it and then I
actually did it a little bit during the process. I measure them uh if I ever
have a question about which one is which. I noticed you switched off of the
tweezers you were using before. Yes, they were slightly magnetic. I had asked
him before, you know, aside from precision screwdrivers if there's any
other tools he felt, you know, could be improved. So, uh make sure if we ever do
tweezers, they're non-magnetic. Yeah, definitely not. Cuz, uh they pick up the
little components and you can't like, you know, work with them or replace them. So, now with that all out of the
way, uh we need to get uh this solder
off of there. So, I'm going to put it back on the preheater and remove that.
And then we'll get the nans reballed and prepare them to be installed. Heck yeah.
We ready to put the nans on now? Yep, we're ready to put the nans on. And
thinking about that, there's one thing I use in my daily setup that I don't have
here, and that is an optical drive. And
I use that just as a platform. It has a thin aluminum panel, doesn't retain much
heat, and allows me to heat the nans while pushing down on them with
tweezers. I will obtain you something. My MacBook. Couldn't find an optical
drive, but hear me out. Old LG Graham.
That'll work just fine. This feels like plastic. I know. I guess we'll find out.
That's how they made it weigh less than a kilogram. Here's our nan chip. Uh,
each one is 1 TB. Sick. So, I'm going from 256 gigs to 2 terab for a couple
hours worth of labor compared to the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that
Apple would charge me for that upgrade. Y, you're right. It's like a no-brainer.
It really is. It really is. If you have the skill to do this, it definitely is
worth it. Even if you don't send it to someone. Yeah, it even is worth it to
pay someone to do it for you. Question for you, though. What do we know about
the quality of this? Yes. So, these nans I buy are brand new, at least sold to me
that way. And I've for with this particular seller, I've never had any
problems. These are Apple nans. So once you install these, there is literally no
difference between putting these on yourself or buying them on the machine
from Apple. They taste the same probably. One difference I noticed from
the original NAND is that it is physically thicker. Yeah, it literally
is a higher stack dye inside the chip. What I usually do is I have some cap-on
tape and I cut it and use that to attach the nands to the bottom of the stencil.
You can actually feel when it goes into place because it has a little bit of solder on it. That makes it a little bit
easier. Okay. Because I was really impressed.
To get this reballed, we're going to be using solder paste, which looks like
this. Essentially, what this is is a bunch of tiny solder balls suspended in
flux. To clean all the solder paste off, I just kind of take it and yeah,
perpendicular, and it just cleans it right off. So, with that done, we're
ready to take the hot air and melt the
solder paste into position and it'll make little balls. So with this, you
want to go pretty slow with it. You don't want to heat it too quickly at once because that will cause the solder
paste to run underneath the stencil and could cause problems. The thermal mass
of our LG Graham might be a little high. Okay. So, it's just a matter of getting
our temperature dialed in for our situation here. Yep. Well, that was
worth it. We have some slightly thicker solder balls. Yep. But we're not done
yet, though. We have to heat it one more time uh with no stencil uh to make sure
everything lays flat on the chip. Okay. So there's one fully done and ready to
be installed. Nice. I think it's so cool that enterprising right to repair folks
managed to figure this stuff out. Not just, you know, in the absence of
Apple's help, but with them in some cases actively working against this kind
of thing. It's actually kind of surprising they make it this easy.
There's no pre-programming required, which was the case on the older T2 Max.
I mean, wow. That is really hunting for
a W for them there. But shirt,
you know, the programming part is a whole another situation. So to not have
to deal with that is good. Less ass at least. Yeah, I guess that's a good way
to put it. Okay, cool. All right, now it's literally just solder them on the
board and do a DFU restore. I'm using uh the board view here to reference which
position pin one goes on each chip. So you can see the pin one dot right there.
These pads I would consider huge compared to most pads. Like I've done
these before. or I've done the SOC's by hand. By hand. Yeah. Well, I'm
impressed. The other nans we're going to be working with is BGA 315, which is
this footprint. These are a lot tighter. You kind of feel when they have a little
resistance, that's when they're hitting the pads. Perfect.
This one I kind of want to get pretty perfect because of the solder mask
issue, right? To make sure we don't accidentally bond to any of the exposed
copper. Yep. Exactly. So, now we just have to heat with the hot air to solder
them into position. Um, one thing you can do to make sure is just to tap it
with some tweezers. You want to see it move? Oh yeah, she moves. So that's
perfect there. Oh, there she goes. Oh, she sucked down really nice. And that's
it. We're done. So now we just have to do a DFU restore. I've always kind of
wondered about people like you where you
seem to both completely recognize all of Apple's horseshit and yet somehow retain
something of a reverence for them. I love Apple as you can probably tell and
I like it because it's a challenge. Like some of them are a challenge like these.
It's just kind of fun to work on and uh I like the software. If you had to give
me Windows 11 or the latest version of macOS, uh it's a night and day
difference to me. I would never consider using Windows 11 in any circumstances.
The reason I've got everything disassembled here, in addition to making
it easier to take it back out to do extra work if needed, uh there's also
some pads you can see right here, and one of which is used to put the machine
in DFU mode. Now, if you just plug it into power as is, it's going to boot
loop and make it extremely difficult to use the keyboard commands to do it. So,
I like to do it this way because you can just plug it in with those pads shorted
and it will uh go straight into DFU mode. And because this resistor isn't
populated, I actually have to short from that pad to this pad. And why would that
resistor not be populated? Uh because it's part of the debug bomb and it's not
stuffed on this board because it's not a development board. How much does that resistor cost for them at scale?
probably like less than a cent. I need to short that pad to this pad. Okay. And
there it is. Revive Mac or restore Mac. Hold option
and click restore Mac cuz I already have the software downloaded. So intuitive.
Such intuitive software. You're right. This is so much better than Windows 11.
Hold option to do it. Okay. And then I need to select 15.5 latest version. If
the nans get programmed improperly due to my mistakes with putting those
components on, the nans are unusable at that point. So that's always fun. Hit
it. Well, what that hold on that happened
right after you cut the camera, you got an Apple logo. I assume that's a good sign. That's good so far. The a slightly
filled progress bar is what I'm really looking for because if that if it gets
to that stage, it's good. Yes. There we go. All right, let's go. We're good.
We're good. We're good. We're good. Should be wrapped there for today. and I take my run at it tomorrow. Uh, sure.
Uh, we'll let this finish. Make sure everything looks good. And there it is
right there. 2 terb. 2 terb, baby.
Heck yeah. Freaking awesome. And the
best part is I'm probably never going to use more than like 30 gigs of I use
network attached storage for everything. Well, the upgrade itself is the fun
process here, so that's all that really matters. Speaking of which, is it my
turn? It is your turn. So, okay. What are we going to do it on? Well, we've
got a pile of Macs here for you. Um, I would advise starting with the M4 Mac
Mini. I think that's going to be the easiest one for a beginner to attempt.
Okay, I'm going to do it then. In its stock configuration, this is a pretty
affordable machine, so no big deal. And it has a module. But in its upgraded
configuration, it's so valuable. I stand to lose so
little and gain so much. We also do have two of these, so if you break it, we can
just movie magic it through the magic of buying two of them. Yeah, as they say.
Feel free to supervise cuz I can't remember how this one comes apart. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Don't tell me the
answer. Just be careful with it. It likes to break. Good. All right. So, do
we just do all of these? Uh, yep. All eight of those. And then there's two T3s
in the middle. And I usually just leave that plugged in. Yep. Just take the fan off. There's just two T5s there holding
it in. And there it is. And there it is. And that's just a T8. So, we've got two
NAND packages. Yep. And they are opposite each other. Step one, heat it
up and scrape away the shoo. Yep, that's right. Let's go. Okay, where's our hot
air gun? Uh, not ready for that just yet. Oh, first you got to put it in the
board holder. We want it oriented this way so that we can more easily slide our
tool in from the side that has no surface mount components in the way. All
right. Now, heat gun. Uh, first, nope, not heat gun. First, prepare your tool.
Do we use the the top scraper or the bottom one? We like the tip. Okay. And
when you do this, you want to be pretty gentle with it as to not scrape away the
solder mask like I accidentally did with your other one. So, do as you say, not
as you do. So, I'm going to guess and I'm going to say 330. No, but you ended
up at that high. That was a bigger board. This has way less thermal mass
and it's elevated, so the the sink the mat won't sink any heat through. Okay.
279. 250. 250. Just concentrated straight to
the chip. I'm totally going to do this, Alex. I would give you probably like a
67% chance of winning here, but 67% or
60 to 70? Yeah, I don't know. I'd give it about a 45%. What? 45?
I know how this goes. How all of it do I need? Like I said, you don't have to be
too thorough with this. As long as you get a separation of some sort between
those components, you're good. Call that good. I'm going to call that good on this part. Okay, so now we heat it up
and we try to get under it. Yep. I'm thinking 300 now. Yep, that's exactly
right. Let's go. Cold knife through butter, baby. You'll start to feel when
it starts to get trapped under there, which is which is exactly what you want.
Let's go, boys. Okay, step one complete.
Now, cleaning. While you're doing this, please make sure not to touch any
components, right? Cuz we're at a solder melting temperature, so they would just
y move. So, we're getting the underfill and the solder off right now. Hey. Yes.
Yep. That's right. That looks pretty good, actually. That looks really good.
I'm pretty satisfied with that. Oh, ye of little faith. All right. Now we go
lower temperature and we get all the rest of the black shrew off. Yes. 250.
250. All right. When you remove that, you want to make sure the stuff on the
sides is pretty flat because the new nans we're going to be installing are
actually wider than the originals. A little bit is not going to hurt anything
when we reball it. It's going to have enough height to make up for any of that. The closer you can get it, the
better. Oh, I'm 100% confident in that. You're good. That's the first 100%
confidence I've ever gotten from my teacher. Okay. I'm gonna think we put on
flux and then we put on solder paste. Fluxy fluxy and solder. Let's go, boys.
But no solder paste on the board. You'll use the spool of solder with the soldering iron to clean off all the
original the residual. So, I'm going to put on just enough to cover it. Okay,
give me my new odds based on what you've seen so far. Okay, we're hitting a good
90%. I'm going to go up to 90%. 90%. Take that, Alex.
Colin gave me 90% now. Yeah, he gave you
45 at first. Exactly. Yeah. See, now you can really see being removed. Look at
her go. Let's go, bud. I just needed more surface contact. Y So, I'm just
using the fatter part of the tip. And now it's working great, bud. You've got
it. Yep. I don't see any issues. Let's go. So, now just clean it with rubbing
alcohol and paper towel. With both sides clean, it's time to reball. You got your
stencil first here. And let me grab the new Nand. Oh, it has little piggies on
it. Why does it have piggies on it? The seller I buy these from in China always
puts little stamps on them like that. Adorable. And these are one tab each.
One tab each. Correct. It's not as much thicker this time, though. Okay. They're
definitely getting the density down with these newer ones for the newer systems.
Very cool. Now, I know that Stencil has four footprints, but the way the stencil
warps, I would highly advise doing just one at a time. Sure, that makes sense.
Okay. Now, if I recall correctly, I pull this off and then we heat it up so that
we don't pull it off yet. No, we ball it first. Yep. Heat it first. Let's go 330.
330. Cuz remember, press the button. And
before you heat, take these tweezers and keep pressure on the chip. It's harder
for me to tell when it starts shimmering when it's all fresh solder balls. Yeah,
that's perfect. I don't see any problems there. Okay. So, one last step is apply
a decent bit of flux to the center of it. Perfect. And heat it again with the
hot air. All right. Because I'm elite hacks, I'm going to say pin one is top
left. Nope. Damn it. All right. All right, that's good. All right, now take
and carefully align your chip to the pads. M right there. Perfect. Thanks.
Not It's impossible to describe, but you
can kind of feel it. I told you you can feel it. Yeah. Now we go to 330. 300.
300. And just kind of hold it at a specific spot and just wait. And I
wouldn't recommend you tap it on this one. Tap it. Oh, I wasn't going to tap
it. Okay, good. Um, once you see the flux start bubbling out of the sides of
it, that usually means it's done. Okay, so you're you're done. I'm seeing
bubbling. So, you're done. It didn't move at all. That's just cuz your
alignment was so perfect that it just went straight down and you couldn't see it. Okay, that's pretty sick. And wait
for it to cool down just a little bit and then hit it. Then we can do the other one. Yep. Yep. And then you got to
do this all over again. I couldn't ask for a better result than that. So, am I
hired? You're hired, man. Let's go. Now, it's time to put it back in. Let's get
my T5 and my T3 queued up so I don't have to keep reaching into the thing. Oh
yeah, what a feature. Look at it go. LTT
precision screwdriver. ltstore.com. Short those two pins. Okay,
I'm 100% confident right now. Let's hope. I hope. You mean we're in DFU
mode? That's a good sign so far. This is
the part where this bar is going to start moving. Yep. Let's hope. And this
is the part where if Apple didn't cheap out and they were willing to put touchcreens on their Macs, I would be
interfering with the process. Once that progress bar starts filling just like
the other one, then we're good. No, we're good now. No, we failed, dude.
What? That can't be right. An error occurred
while formatting the NAND. That means either the NAND's incompatible or
improperly programmed. So,
I think we might be so here. However, we
still have an option to go to 1 TBTE with some extra chips I have. That was
shockingly fast. So, I have 1 TB of storage then. Yes, 1 TB uh using my
backup chips that I luckily decided to bring with me. That's fine. So, I still
got a very significant upgrade for extra storage and I got a learning experience.
Yeah. And nothing you did messed anything up. Nothing was your fault. So,
it was just bad chips and incompatible nans. And I think that's probably a good
thing for people to take away from this video is that while yes, you know, we
can work around Apple's limitations, it isn't even for an expert completely
without risk. Yeah. Um which isn't to say that it isn't worth the effort. I
mean, for every person who contacts you and, you know, ultimately gets their
machine upgraded, they get two benefits. One, they save money, and two, they keep
a machine that potentially they couldn't use anymore because of its limited
hardware. Exactly. Out of the garbage
bin, which is pretty important to me. Anyway, unlike a lot of people, you did
not mess up the board when removing the underfill, which a lot of people do. So,
that's pretty impressive. I had a very helpful supervisor. Yeah, we shouted out
your channel earlier, but uh hey, now we're showing it. Go check them out.
Doss Dude 1. We'll have them linked in the video description. Thanks so much for coming up here, Colin. And thanks so
much for enduring me telling you about our sponsor. Maybe by wearing these
shoes from Vessie, but I love my sandals. Vessie is not going to sponsor
us. If he keeps wearing those sandals, so I'm going to steal them. There must
be a reason why Linus is so obsessed with sandals. I got to find out. Maybe
they're actually better than Vessie. I spent 20 seconds putting them on and I
just slip right into Vessie. One second. Breathability though, I give a five
star, but I don't want to show off my ugly toes. Maybe it's a waterproof. Of
course not. You think I'm Vessie? How about the look? Vessie strikes again.
The ugly sandals are nearly 20% heavier. Mission complete. I replace all of his
sandals with Vessie. Check out their new ultra light Vestie Pacific sneaker. They
come with a one-year warranty with worryfree 30-day returns at
vessi.com/LTT and get 15% off your first pair. Wait,
he has more sandals. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the time
that we water cooled a Mac Studio? That was a lot of fun. That sounds fun.