What happens if you try to UPGRADE a $5,000 Mac Studio?

you guys today's video uh is a little scary because i'm putting nine thousand dollars worth of mac on the line to find out the answer to one simple question is the max studio upgradeable make sure to get subscribed leave a like down below this should be interesting [Music] today's video is sponsored by morningbrew a free daily newsletter delivered monday through sunday do you start your mornings aimlessly browsing social media with no clear idea where you can find reliable accurate information well morningbrew gets you up to date with the latest stories in business finance and tech in just five minutes morningbrew gives you news in a witty relevant and informative way compared to dry traditional news where you often have to read paragraphs to get to the point so go ahead and give it a try it takes just 15 seconds to get signed up and stay up to date on the latest in tech business and finance check out the link in the description below to try morning brew completely free and now let's get back to the video i've got a four thousand dollar and a five thousand dollar mac studio that i'm gonna be putting on the line today so let me explain how this is gonna work and why i have two uh you may have seen max tech's video where they basically tore down the entire mac studio and before taking out the logic board they noticed that there is actually a modular ssd port two specifically and it seems like by default one of them is populated and one of them is empty so it begs the question can you actually upgrade the storage well it's hard to know because it's a proprietary port without having two mac studio ssds and i think you can now see where this is going so what we're gonna do because i've already done the benchmarks on this one i am actually going to wipe the ssd completely erase it from disk utility uh because i think that would probably give us the best chance of this working the other thing that i did over here was boot into recovery mode and i actually ran a terminal command called csr util disable which disables system integrity protection so i think that should give us the best chance of maybe being able to get the machine to recognize the new storage i really don't know what to expect i'm going into this completely blind okay here is the mac studio typical apple they've given us this lovely looking rubber ring very clean no visible screws but that means we have to peel it open to get inside the thing [Music] oh i finally got the pry tool in oh my gosh folks this this is not an easy job just getting around this adhesive is it's a it's a real challenge but we're finally in all right so to take off this bottom case these are t8 screws and they are damn they are really in there [Music] next round of screws [Music] so there we have our 370 watt power supply and i have to say from a right to repair perspective this sucks apple has left that basically completely exposed for i assume cooling reasons to make the components easier uh for air to get across but the end result is an extremely and unnecessarily hazardous opening procedure which is really not good [Music] so here on the top left of the underside of the board is our ssd now this is another t8 screw we're gonna go ahead and remove that and then it seems like apple has taped over um some sort of a heat spreader to i guess make this look cooler on the inside that they don't want you to see oh folks we have removed the ssd uh if you look back at tear downs of the m1 pro and max macbook pro this is i think the same chips that apple uses there but one thing that is standing out to me is that underneath the ssd slot here we have these two texas instrument control modules and then there's also this covered module whereas on the other ssd slot over here the pcb is blank underneath so if i had to guess right now based on what we're seeing i would guess that the one or maybe even the two terabyte models come with a single ssd module installed over here whereas the four and eight terabyte models probably have a second module on this side if you look at apple's marketing images from the event you can actually see two ssds included in one of their models but the question for us now is can i take this ssd module and install it in the empty slot on the other mac studio to double its storage from one to two terabytes well let's find out [Music] i'm utterly terrified but we're gonna plug it in and turn it on and see what happens oh my oh look at this we seem to have upset the gods of apple they have blessed us with a flashing amber light in fact the more eagle-eyed viewer might even notice that this is morse code it's going one two three one two three one two three that is morse code for sos our mac studio is crying out for help papa tim you gotta rescue him someone's trying to make him faster and better so the mac studio does not like having storage added to it but then i thought okay we should probably figure out whether the slot works at all so i took the built-in original ssd swapped it over to the second slot and then tried booting it off of that [Music] this time though we didn't get the blinking amber sos light we just got a blinking normal white status light which means that it didn't recognize the ssd at all so what does this tell us well it tells us that we can't boot from the secondary ssd slot which is really sad but more importantly it recognized when we put another ssd in there that the firmware didn't like that's why we got that flashing amber light instead of just the flashing white light so clearly it could tell that another ssd was in there but not an ssd that it would let us boot from or access or even turn the system on at all so clearly things aren't going great so far but i decided to try one last experiment since we saw that we were not able to boot from the second ssd slot i decided to swap the ssds so this isn't really an upgrade so much as an exchange i took the ssd from the five thousand dollar machine and put it in the four thousand dollar machine to see if the system would boot from a known good ssd in a slot that we know the machine is actually capable of booting from [Music] [Music] it was at this point that my worst fear came true the machine refused to turn on i tried turning it on normally by pressing the power button i tried booting into recovery mode by holding the power button i unplugged and replugged the machine several times it simply refused to boot what apple is doing here with the mac studio is simply inexcusable we all thought late last year when apple announced the iphone and mac repair program that would make parts and tools and repair guides available to the public that they were changing their ways but this proves without a shadow of a doubt that the only reason they did any of that was to avoid regulatory scrutiny apple does not care about your right to repair make no mistake what we've seen here today is that apple is intentionally deliberately restricting your access to your own device in my opinion this is actually worse than soldering the storage onto a logic board this is worse than soldering the ram onto the soc in the case of unified memory you at least get some benefits for the compromise of lacking upgradeability i would personally rather have 16 gigabytes of unified memory than 32 gigabytes of removable standard memory unified memory just has a lot of inherent benefits but there is no benefit to shipping a machine with removable storage mediums that can't be upgraded and then they have the audacity to flash an amber sos signal really they're gonna play the victim after restricting your ability to modify a machine that you paid five thousand dollars for that was designed with removable storage i mean it is bad enough that there is a second ssd slot that is non-functional that means apple is shipping multi-thousand dollar machines where they were too cheap to even install the controllers that were necessary to make that slot work which is outrageous but not only that they won't even allow you to swap the factory ssd out for a different one not even a third-party one another oem apple factory ssd that has no justification i'm sure they'll talk about security and privacy okay if i want security i'm just going to lock this thing up with the kensington lock all right i don't need you to be making decisions for me about the capability and the capacity of this machine for its entire lifespan the risk of somebody taking the storage out and stealing my data pales in comparison to the lack of ability to increase the storage on a five thousand dollar machine that could easily last me 10 years and i get it you know it's not really that different from what apple has been doing with macbooks for six years now but there is something just repulsive about shipping a machine with removable storage and then not letting you remove it for completely arbitrary reasons it's not like doing this was necessary to save space i mean sure yeah maybe you have to use a proprietary ssd module if you want to get this design fine whatever but there's no reason why that should be firmware locked to the machine that it ships in that is a purely unnecessary decision that was made out of greed but who knows maybe we can persuade apple to change their mind because after all it is a software or firmware lock that's preventing this machine from being user upgradable as much as it pains me to have a secondary ssd slot that doesn't function on a 5 000 machine we could at least try to get apple to change their mind about letting us upgrade the primary ssd the community of people who want to upgrade and customize their macs i'm sure is a small one but this information is now out there and if enough of us are angry maybe just maybe we could get apple to reverse course if they did that obviously i'd be happy but they definitely won't get any points from me so for today unfortunately we took the l on this one and with that i thank you guys for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 471,150

Keywords: Mac studio, upgrade, upgradable, Mac studio teardown, can you upgrade Mac studio, apple silicon upgrade, right to repair, apple, apple repair, apple upgrade, apple scam

Id: xEwS_VGD2yY

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022