Those familiar with the restricted, soldered storage design of standard Apple silicon-built MacBooks have reason to rejoice. Mac Logic Board Enthusiast iBoff RCC has shown this restrictive storage design can be circumvented with specialized breakout PCBs that allow for full storage drive swapping over the NVMe M.2 interface.
One major notable restriction of MacBook storage has been overcome here — and it bodes particularly well for the long-term future of devices that follow this modding route, since a corrupted SSD can outright prevent a MacBook from booting… and is, of course, near-impossible to deal with for most end users. This is noted as a fundamental concern for long-term MacBook repairs and maintenance and not something Apple should be forcing its users to deal with by soldering storage to the board, to begin with.
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Unfortunately, there are some major caveats here worth discussing. The biggest issue for Joe Public is the requirement for a second MacBook to help you reboot your original MacBook after replacing the original SSD storage. Beyond that, the high-difficulty, high-risk mod process involving the removal of the original SSD chips may also raise some eyebrows. However, the final results indicate that modding the M.2 slot does not negatively impact SSD performance.
While some may question the practicality of even considering an upgrade like this, it’s important to remember that such steps wouldn’t be necessary if Apple weren’t insistent on setting arbitrary limits on users of its hardware. These arbitrary limits, especially soldering SSD storage instead of allowing it to be freely swapped, speak to a desire to nickel-and-dime consumers instead of leaving the tools and processes for easy DIY repairs and upgrades in place. Those stuck with a low-capacity MacBook model aren’t going to have recourse besides slower external storage or solutions like this.
In terms of saving physical footprint, it seems obvious that soldering SSD drives and RAM offers virtually no benefit when compared to simply supporting the smallest swappable version of these existing standards. What Apple might be saving in millimeters within the build is easily being lost by consumers when issues that would otherwise warrant a quick hardware swap become nigh unsolvable.
