Repair shop in China can upgrade the storage on your iPhone, iPad

What if you could take your iPhone to the shop and have more storage added? It's no longer an "if," at least in China where one repair shop has cracked the puzzle of upgrading iPhones and iPads.

Apple has software protection in place that verifies that the hardware is the right configuration. That is circumvented through a loophole that may be closed in the future. For the time being, the shop owner reports that 70+ devices have been upgraded and they work fine.

Some app data might be lost, some apps may need to be re-installed, but ultimately an iCloud backup can save you most of the headache.

Working with these chips by hand is difficult, but special tools were created to help with the process. Even so, the motherboard on the iPhone 5s is too small and cramped to safely swap out the memory chip.

An iPhone 6 is much easier and most iPads reportedly work. There's no word on the new iPhone 6s generation though.

As for the price, CNY 580 ($92/€84) nets you 128GB storage, CNY 450 ($71/€65) gives you 64GB. Most people go for the bigger option as a lot of the cost is for the work involved. Considering Apple is charging $100/€110 to go from 16GB to 64GB, it's a pretty sweet deal. One that will probably end soon when Apple catches wind of this.

Source (in Chinese) | Via