- Hey there Apple. In case you didn't know, this is an SSD. Normally users can swap these to repair 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, ooh! 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? - [Alex] That would be crazy. - It would be crazy, just like it would be crazy
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25% off at the link below. (bright upbeat music) - 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. Their packaging engineers are super cool. I'm not gonna 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 four,
it's got USB type eight, 10 gig ethernet, HDMI, and of course, display
port over Thunderbolt. You got USB, an 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. Well, it's kind of an anti feature, 'cause now I can't lift up my computer by the 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 gonna hop on it too much. But getting into the Mac Studio is a bit of a pain in the butt. They could have put the
screws somewhere accessible but instead they're under
a little rubber foot that you're gonna have to bang
up in order to get up them. What's the best way to get
under this stupid thing. - So looks like 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 (beep) 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 short
circuit 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. (air whooshing) Gotta give credit. They got style. Matte black PCBs all the time. - Wait, are these they're
completely different. - Wait, what? Oh, whoa. Did we just discover that
there are different revisions of the Mac studio power supply? Are these the exact same skew? - I thought so..
- Can you double check? - Yeah. - What the crap, these are
completely whole 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 have it to guess, I think what probably
happened is Apple put out for qualifying designs
from multiple vendors as you would because you
wanna 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 gonna 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 that
they're exactly the same specs. - Which ones which? - Oh, mine has a schmo. - Okay. 'Cause they probably... Knowing Apple they're probably chipped on. 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'm not even gonna keep
disassembling it for now. I'm just gonna 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 wanna know. Right? That's why we're
here doing what Apple could easily document
and tell us, but don't. (air whooshing) Oh Alex. - Yeah. - What's going on? - What do you mean? - What is this PC monitor? (beep) Where's my studio monitor. - If you want, I can go grab it. - Look how long this power cord is Alex? - That's a display power 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 short circuit 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 would 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 IO and less
to do with the SSDs because as we know, Apple puts their
SSD controllers directly on their M1 SOC. So these are gonna be wired
up directly to the SOC. I gotta give myself credit
for nailing that this wasn't an SSD before. I think anyone else did. I was on Owen show right
after I had checked out Anthony Short circuit. And I was like I don't see a controller or a D1 on there. That's right ladies and gentlemen we've got four none 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
eight terabytes of capacity they're gonna need yeah. At least eight packages
with current technology as far as I'm aware. Hey, where's that at
sabrent eight terabyte SSD. Yes. Confirmed sabrent
is using eight packages to hit eight terabytes. So that's probably why we
haven't seen any loaded with two already because
the eight terabyte one is so expensive and not
too many people are gonna 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 wanna 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 analogs
right there between the two, often a DRAM cache though that's not a given and a controller but Apple is conspicuously
missing both a cache 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 gonna be a couple of dollars on every
single unit, putting it in the Silicon of the diode
means it is now pennies. Now in the long ago past,
allocating diode to anything other than compute and connectivity,
would've been unthinkable but over time as transistors
have continued to shrink and especially now as modular and chip designs are becoming
more and more popular adding a little bit of
diode here 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 diode
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've initially thought
there are 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. - You should probably put the other bit of the cage in there first. - Fine. I'll put that in. It's probably fine. Yeah, it's fine. Could I just get a few of
like A4 paper or something? - Well, it's not on so. - Oh, is it not? - No. I see lights flashing inside. - Yes. - Oh,
- It's saying SOS. - Oh, it's mad. Oh right. 'Cause I swapped to the SSD. - Yeah. - Oh, balls. You think
there would be something on the screen instead of
just flashing a red thing. I mean they clearly know
what the problem is. There's a blink code here. - Yeah. And in the past they actually had recovery environments. So you could reflash all
of the stuff on here. we just connect to the internet in the recovery environment. - Yeah. - 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. (host laughing) - That was creepy but accurate, yeah. - Like I'm their customer 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. It really put the FU and DFU mode. In fact, you have to own
a second Mac to do this. - It will take a little while for this to fully install the OS. - Well, that's perfect 'Cause I have a conference
call right now, but wait that means we've made it at
least as far as that swapping it worked a hundred
percent of the time for us. - Yep. - So unlike the people who said that they did have difficulty
with some of their swaps we managed a 100% success
rate sample sizes too. - Yep. - Okay. (upbeat music) 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 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 four terabytes. 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 wanna correct that. Are you ready? Theoretically, this is a
one terabyte Mac studio now. - Well you probably need to
do the whole DFU thing again. - Well, you know sure. 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 gonna work? Did we already talk about how Scotty from strange parts managed to change out the flash on an iPhone? - Oh yeah. And it just detected it. He just plugged it in to
restore and it worked. - Which shows you that even
with all of Apple, really. So even with Apples, SOC 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's absolutely no
way that Apple produces these main boards and
hard locks them forever to a particular capacity 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 security reason
that they might provide for doing this all on the SOC
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 particular
really cool about this? - 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 (beep) 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 you 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 great big stink about it they're just gonna keep on
doing this kind of thing. By the way, when I say they're
customers, I mean me too I just bought two (beep) Mac studios. Am I not a customer? Tell you who you should be
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