- 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,
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(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?
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- If this video made you angry and you need a detox
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