I think dosdude1 does decent work; not just what DosLabElectronics offers as far as commercial services (e.g. selling aftermarket upgrades to Apple Silicon SSDs by doing NAND replacements for about half what Apple charges for the equivalent storage if ordered from the factory) but he used to offer things like OS X/macOS patchers to keep older Apple hardware limping along on newer OS builds than Apple supported officially, long before projects such as OpenCore Legacy Patcher were as polished as they are these days.

However, watching him turn two broken M1 Apple Silicon laptops into one functioning laptop is something else!

I've done similar things, taking good components from multiple broken laptops and effectively stitching them together into one newer frankenstein functioning system.

But not at the level of doing BGA reworking!

Moreover, Apple hasn't just done the bone headed move of making a lot of their newer systems have soldered NAND storage which was bad enough (something I hope they may stop doing since we have seen the return to removable [albeit, proprietary interface] storage in the Mac Mini more recently) but I didn't realize they also have begun serializing the WiFi chip and TouchID sensors to the SoC; meaning that repairs such as the one in this video, require not just removing the NAND chips and putting them onto a suitable "donor" board, but also removing the EEPROM that ties all that WiFi and TouchID and SoC stuff together, effectively meaning that no fewer than six components need to be removed, and resoldered, and I think only the EEPROM is simple enough to not require a BGA rework? (Maybe the TouchID chip is simpler too, but he dealt with that off screen I guess).

What a repairability nightmare!

Still, he seems to make it look easy and at least personally I learned a thing or two watching this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtPQeAOaNi4

#dosdude1 #repairs #RightToRepair #AppleSilicon