A maintenance engineer in China did some DIYing and were able to upgrade an M1 Mac to add more RAM and SSD storage (via chongdiantou).
M1 Mac Upgrades
Many, if not all, Apple devices are notoriously difficult to repair or upgrade on your own. Device components are directly soldered to the logic board, like in the Mac mini. But Yang Changshun recently discovered that, while difficult, it’s still possible. They successfully upgraded the SSD and RAM on at least M1 Mac.
Images show SSD and RAM modules being removed from a Mac logic board, and a screenshot of the upgrade storage in macOS. As with any hardware DIY, there are caveats, but any interested person or company now know that it’s at least possible to perform Mac upgrades.
I though the RAM is an integral part of the M1 chip. How was he able to upgrade or add RAM directly to the Apple Silicon chip? If he added external RAM, I wonder if the M1 software would be able to find it since that software expects the RAM to be on chip? The SSD is external, but it’s not implemented as RAM. I don’t think the architecture can implement external RAM “yet” if ever.
As an aside, I think the on-chip RAM is a major part of the M1’s miracle sauce for making the M1 very fast with low power. I think we just have to wait for more on-chip RAM.