How I Upgraded My iPhone Memory 800% - in Shenzhen, China
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people recommend it for its vivid look at Shenzhen's repair culture and for the flash chip upgrade, and cite it in discussions of hardware modding.
What it is
Scotty Allen of Strange Parts travels through Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei markets and learns to upgrade an iPhone 6s from 16GB to 128GB by swapping its flash chip. It is part 3 of his custom iPhone series and shows the difficulty of the hands-on repair work.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2018 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends tzakrajs · 2018-04 · on “Weirdstuff Warehouse is closed”
Your last sentence reminds me of this recent post [this video] and it gives such a cool sense of Shenzhen as a place to make and modify things.
Recommends GeekyBear · 2021-04 · on “Chinese engineers cracked Apple's M1 chip and successfully upgrade RAM and SSD”
There's a video of a western guy living in China learning to desolder Flash memory chips from an iPhone and then solder higher capacity chips in their place from back in 2018. [this video] Being in Shenzhen China, he was able to buy the needed tools and many broken boards to practice on, and eventually managed to do it on a live board himself.
Recommends G3rn0ti · 2021-11 · on “How I Made My Own iPhone [video]”
Another cool episode is where he upgrades a 16GB iPhone to 128GB by soldering a larger flash chip onto the board: [this video]
Cites samfisher83 · 2018-05 · on “iOS 11.4 to Disable USB Port After 7 Days: What It Means for Mobile Forensics”
You could just pull the flash chip and image it. You would need to figure out how to get the key, but pulling the flash chip and reading it doesn't look too hard if you can use a heat gun. If you lived in Shenzhen you could go the market and buy a flash reader. Strange Parts is youtube channel where the guy does this. [this video]