A Bold Chip Swap Gives the MacBook Neo a Full Terabyte of Storage Pulled Straight From an iPhone

Modder dosdude1 replaced an entry-level MacBook Neo’s usual 256GB of soldered storage with a 1TB NAND flash chip from an iPhone 16 Pro. We’re all aware that Apple never allows you to order a large capacity on this specific laptop model, despite the fact that the device and phone both use the same A18 Pro processor. However, because they do, this swap is actually possible without the need for any special adapters or fancy chassis redesigns.

To begin, you must disassemble the device, removing all connectors and lifting out the logic board. Once that’s done, take off some shielding tape to gain access to the storage compartment, which is a tight fit. Before you can replace the old chip, soften the connections with a hot air pistol and carefully remove the underfill glue bit by bit to prevent injuring any neighboring surface-mount components. An IC spatula comes in handy for removing the old chip without damaging anything.

The new 1TB K8A5 NAND chip is a blank slate, thus it must be re-balled with new solder spheres to precisely match the board footprint before it can be installed. After that, a bit of flux cleans the vacant pads on the logic board, followed by another round of precision heating to fix everything in place and provide stable electrical bonding across the BGA array.

After reassembly, the first step is to see if the laptop recognizes the additional storage, which it does right away, but you will need to perform a full DFU restoration from a second Mac to bring the system fully online. That second Mac will be your best friend during the process, and some benchmarking reveals just how big of a difference 1TB of extra storage makes, since not only does capacity increase, but read and write speeds also improve.

Looking closely at the cleared footprint of the old NAND chip does give you a bit of a hint that Apple did actually design the board with more flexibility in mind, as there’s a whole ring of unused pads around the main contact area, suggesting that they were planning to offer different NAND packages even if they never actually ended up doing so, and the best part is you don’t need to worry about any software patches or firmware hacks because the processor already
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