If you have purchased a Mac with Apple's proprietary M1 chip, you are probably satisfied with your machine's performance, even if you can't help but wonder about its upgrade potential. As it turns out, a Mac with an Apple M1 chip may be more upgradeable than you think.

This information comes from China, where technicians have reported being able to upgrade both memory and storage in M1-equipped MacBook Airs. in a report picked up by MacRumors, a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage was upgraded to 16GB memory and 1TB of capacity.

Yang Changshun, an engineer in Guangzhou, China, detailed his process on Chinese social media (image and description via chongdiantou.com). Through several images, he removes the SSD and RAM from his M1 Mac and adds upgraded storage. It's a process that involves a lot of risk, including voiding Apple's warranty. Nevertheless, this report suggests that upgrading an M1 Mac is possible, albeit somewhat complicated.

Therefore, this should not be repeated unless one is very experienced. It is also not immediately clear whether the new storage and upgrades will work well for the foreseeable future, given Apple's tendency to recognize the informal hardware of devices like cell phones and brick those phones.

With that in mind, it goes without saying that this is an impressive achievement, but one that may not be replicable for most users. At the same time, Apple is currently lobbying, along with HP and Honeywell, against a Nevada bill that would require hardware manufacturers to provide parts, schematics, and instructions to third-party repair shops. Several bills have now been introduced across the country that would make Apple machines upgradeable, eliminating the need for users of Apple devices to go to authorized dealers and instead force Apple to use smaller (and less expensive) independent repair shops.