We all know that one of the drawbacks of the transition to Apple Silicon is that, at least on the cheaper Macs intended for the general public, it is impossible to expand memory and / or storage from your computer after your purchase. What you buy is what you will have until the end of the life of that machine.
However, someone in China has achieved what seemed impossible: expand memory of M1 chip, both in RAM and storage. And they do it directly, changing the component of the M1 chip itself as you can see in the image above. The photos have spread across Chinese social media and on Twitter. DuanRui has spread them.
It is very very very very difficult, but it is not impossible
Change the components of an SoC (system on chip) like the M1 it’s incredibly risky and precise, so of course this is not something that we are going to be able to do quietly in our homes (in fact not even Apple authorized technicians have permission to be able to touch the chips at this level). But the author of these photographs claims to have been able to expand his M1 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage to 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage. The Mac recognizes the components and runs smoothly.
Anyway, this is not going to change things: it takes such expert hands to be able to do this correctly that for my part I maintain that the Apple Silicon chips will not be able to be expanded. What they have shown from China is that it is one thing that it cannot be done, and another thing is that it is absolutely impossible. Of course, all the Macs involved in these extensions have their warranties voided.