3 HN users recommended this documentary3 months2018–2021score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
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.
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.
“it gives such a cool sense of Shenzhen as a place to make and modify things” (HN, 2018)
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.
Desoldering and upgrading iPhone flash memory in Shenzhen.
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]
Channel where the host pulls and reads flash chips.
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