A Chinese repairman known on YouTube as DirectorFeng has increased the storage capacity of the recently released MacBook Neo from 256GB to 1TB by replacing a soldered NAND chip. This is a significant upgrade, as the standard MacBook Neo models with the A18 Pro chip and 8GB of RAM are only available in 256GB or 512GB versions.
A Chinese repairman known on YouTube as DirectorFeng has increased the storage capacity of the recently released MacBook Neo from 256GB to 1TB by replacing a soldered NAND chip. This is a significant upgrade, as the standard MacBook Neo models with the A18 Pro chip and 8GB of RAM are only available in 256GB or 512GB versions.
Apple introduced the MacBook Neo on March 4, and sales began on March 11. The starting price of the system is $599 and 699 euros in Europe. The device received an A18 Pro chip, a 13-inch Liquid Retina display (2408×1506), a 6-core CPU, a 5-core GPU, and a fanless design.
YouTuber DirectorFeng unsoldered the original NAND chip from the logic board, cleaned the pads, and installed a larger chip using component repair tools. After reassembly, macOS successfully recognized the increased memory, VideoCardz writes .
The Neo has one major drawback: the memory and storage are not upgradeable, at least not easily. However, the DirectorFeng upgrade is not something that the average user can do.
In the MacBook Neo, Apple uses unsoldered NAND chips instead of removable SSDs, so any change in memory size requires microsoldering and is almost guaranteed to void the official warranty.
"We performed a direct upgrade of the drive from 256 GB to 1 TB, completing a full cycle of work: processing contact pads, reballing (restoring ball pins) of the memory, checking the system firmware, BGA sealing and curing, as well as re-applying thermal paste to the processor. The upgrade to 1 TB was completely successful, the system booted flawlessly, and the read/write speeds even increased slightly - we actually created an official 1 TB version that Apple has not yet released," the description for the YouTube video states.
