Risks are involved, but still the easiest way to upgrade

Nov 5, 2015 10:42 GMT  ·  By

There are a lot of things you can buy for one dollar if you live in China, and pretty much everything has a price there, no matter if it’s legal or not.

This time, for instance, $100 (€85) is all you need to perform an unauthorized hardware upgrade to an iPhone 6 and boost the storage capacity from 16 GB to 128 GB. If you want to do it legally and buy an iPhone that comes with 128 GB from the very beginning, it’s twice more expensive, so it’s no surprise that back-alley services are increasingly popular in China.

SlashGear writes that several Chinese shops can perform in-store upgrades for iPhone 6 from 16 GB to 128 GB, and prices for the whole operation go as low as $92 (80).

Obviously, there are huge risks involved in this process because these Chinese shops break your iPhone apart, then replace the original NAND chip with an aftermarket one. Every piece is then put back in the device, and with the help of a specific software solution, whose name is not yet available, the “engineers” bypass Apple’s system checks and make it possible for the new storage to be accessed.

Only the iPhone 6 works for now

Before doing this, it’s worth mentioning that Apple doesn’t recommend such an upgrade by any means, mostly because it can obviously damage the device and make it impossible to use. But on the other hand, there’s another reason Apple doesn’t want such upgrades to be performed: sales of the top iPhone models could be significantly impacted, as more Chinese buyers opt for the cheapest versions before actually upgrading storage at half the price.

For the moment, this upgrade only works on the iPhone 6, and there’s no mention if the iPhone 6 Plus will ever be supported. The cheapest upgrade you can make is to 64 GB and costs $71 (€55).

While most of those who have already performed the upgrade claim everything’s working smoothly afterwards, there are some reports that accessing iCloud no longer possible. So if you do decide to go for such an upgrade, keep in mind that not everything might run as expected afterwards.

The upgrade is performed manually, so there are big chances something can go wrong
The upgrade is performed manually, so there are big chances something can go wrong

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The upgrade only work on the iPhone 6 for now
The upgrade is performed manually, so there are big chances something can go wrong
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