Don’t replace soldered RAM at home.

Technically yes, practically no — unless you’ve got pro-level soldering gear and a backup motherboard ready to sacrifice.

The chip itself is cheap: maybe $20–$50 for a higher-capacity LPDDR4/5 BGA package from a surplus seller. But the hot air rework station, stencil, flux, preheater, and the skill to align 0.4mm pitch balls without lifting pads… that’s not cheap or easy. One slip and you’ve bricked the board. Even pros see failures on dense PCBs.

The real risk isn’t the chip cost — it’s the motherboard. A modern laptop or MacBook will cost $800+ to replace if you cook the surrounding components or blow off capacitors. Also, the firmware/firmware might not even recognize the larger RAM without a patched VBIOS or controller reconfiguration. So you could get a perfect solder job and still have a dead machine.

I’d only attempt this if the device is already broken and you’re doing it as a learning project. Otherwise, buy a model with the RAM you need from the start.