Apple News
In Shenzhen, you can upgrade your 16GB iPhone to 128GB for around $60
In particular, there’s a local company called BeSound in the Shenzhen market district that makes it possible to upgrade the internal storage of an iPhone, at a minimal cost. Apple typically charges a $100 premium to bump up the storage option from the standard 16GB, with the 128GB iPhone 6 costing $200 more than the 16GB iPhone 6. For more adventurous folks, who don’t mind voiding their warranty, BeSound will happily upgrade your internal storage, all the way up to 128GB, for up to $60.
If you don’t want to go up to 128GB, you can upgrade to 32GB for only $20, and up to 64GB for $35.
The entire process is pretty quick at around 30 minutes, and involves the worker dismantling the iPhone 6 to install an internal flash storage option manufactured by Toshiba. What’s better, is that all the information that was stored in the old storage option will be transferred over to the new one, so even after the upgrade you won’t lose anything in the process.
This is likely a practice that won’t take off in the United States in any real capacity, but for those that can make it to the Shenzhen market, and don’t mind voiding their warranty, it’s a quick and cheap option to upgrade the storage available in your device pretty quickly.
Does it work?
The iPhone powers back on as expected after the upgrade, and after launching the Settings app and going to the General > About preferences pane, the iPhone registers the 128GB internal storage module instead of the old 16GB internal storage module.
With that being said, yes the process appears to have worked, but keep in mind this kind of hardware upgrade would void your Apple warranty because it involves a non-authorized technician tampering with the hardware inside of your iPhone, so don’t expect Apple to help you if you end up having problems with the third-party storage upgrade down the line.