 Hey there, Apple! In case you didn't know, this is an SSD. Normally, users can swap these to repair or 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? That would be crazy! It would be crazy! Just like, it would be crazy to tell you about our sponsor! GlassWire. GlassWire lets you see past and present network activity, detect malware on your PC or Android device, and block its connections to prevent things from getting worse. Use offer code LINUS for 25% off at the link below. So. Naturalauderdings, 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 4, it's got USB type A, 10 gig ethernet, HDMI out, of course, display port over Thunderbolt. You got USB and 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 because 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 harp 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 bung up in order to get up them. What's the best way to get under this stupid thing? So it 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 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. I gotta give credit that it 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 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 had 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 one's which? Oh, mine has the shmoo. Okay, because knowing Apple, they're probably chipped to old. 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. Oh, Alex? Yeah? What's going on? What do you mean? What is this PC monitor? 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 port 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'd 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 is no chip down here. So my guess would be that this has more to do with the front I L 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 WAN show right after I had checked out Anthony's short circuit and I was like, I don't see a controller or DRAM on there. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, we've got four NAND 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 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 the cache and the 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 die means it is now pennies. Now in the long ago past, allocating die area to anything other than compute and connectivity would have been unthinkable. But over time, as transistors have continued to shrink, and especially now as modular and chiplet designs are becoming more and more popular, adding a little bit of die area 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 die 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 have initially thought they're 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. That's probably fine. Yeah, that's fine. Can I just get a sheet of like A4 paper or something? Well, it's not on, so. Oh, is it not? I see lights flashing inside. Yes, it's saying SOS. Oh, it's mad. Oh, right, because I swapped to the SSD. Yeah. Oh, balls. You'd 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, you know, reflash all of the stuff on here. It would 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. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. That was creepy but accurate, yeah. Like I'm their customer, aren't I? Am I not? Oh, you're not. Ha, not a real customer. Plug the Mac computers together with a supported USB-C cable. What supported USB-C 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. They really put the FU in DFU mode. The fact you have to own a second Mac to do this. It will take a little while for this to fully, you know, 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 100% of the time for us. Yeah. I feel like the people who said that they did have difficulty with some of their swaps, we managed a 100% success rate sample size of two. Yep. Okay. BRB. We're back and it worked. It sort of worked. 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 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 to 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 hotspoppable, 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. This works, that's kinda 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 Apple's 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 of 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 is 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's particularly 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 and you. Those are the only two reasons. Man, in researching this, I read some of the worst possible takes. You got people talking about how, well the M1 is architected different and that's why they 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 a great big stink about it, they're just gonna keep on doing this kind of thing. By the way, when I say their customers, I mean me too. I just bought two Mac studios. Am I not a customer? Tell you who you should be a customer of, our sponsor. Squarespace. Need a website, but don't have the know-how? Squarespace makes it easy. 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