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Comment by nippoo | Hacker News Reader

I spent a day at the Huaqiangbei market and honestly there's very little like it in the world. I didn't go in looking for anything in particular, but left with all sorts of tools and parts that I didn't even know I needed. A full USB power debugger with colour screen ($8), various LED module samples, a few Android tablets with a 9" screen, dual SIM and microSD ($30): my friend had his iPhone upgraded from 16GB to 128GB storage (a student literally desoldered the flash with a hot air gun, transferred it over in a BGA reader and soldered a new chip on, in under an hour)... as well as a whole number of little parts and cabling and components I didn't even know existed. Others have written more about it (https://shift.newco.co/2016/10/13/what-50-buys-you-at-huaqia... is the classic article) but if you're even faintly interested in electronics I'd wholeheartedly recommend it.

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my friend had his iPhone upgraded from 16GB to 128GB storage (a student literally desoldered the flash with a hot air gun, transferred it over in a BGA reader and soldered a new chip on, in under an hour)

One huge difference I've noticed between HQB (and other smaller electronics markets I've been to elsewhere in China) and whatever repair shops still exist in the West is how much more interactive the whole experience is. I once went to HQB with a friend who wanted to get his laptop fixed, and the serviceperson (who also happened to be female --- another thing first-time visitors may be surprised by is the nearly 50/50 gender ratio) would take it apart and diagnose while talking to us, showing exactly what the problem was. They had run out of the part that needed replacement, but instead of telling us to come back later, she left her stall and lead us to another store in the same building to buy a reel of it, then went back and replaced it, showed us that it now worked, and asked a very reasonable price. The shop had several stalls of others doing the same thing, and a pretty long line of people waiting too.

It's a huge contrast to more "Western" repair experiences, where you're lucky to have it done on the same day, much less get to see the process or be told what the problem was.

And the Western approach is to replace the board that’s faulty rather than the part or two that causes 99% of the failures of that board.

We could only pray that the western repair shop sends the board somewhere for refurbishment.

It's a labor cost.

As hardware becomes more all-in-one, your cost of labor for knowledge of desoldering a single piece becomes more and more.

Noone wants 'repaired goods' in the US.

Sort of. I feel like it’s a technical education thing.

The fellow in Shenzhen is probably getting paid hundreds of dollars per month. (Just a guess, I know SZ is expensive, but has lots of labour coming from outer lying areas).

Even if it cost 10x labour for the procedure of turning a 16gb iPhone into a 128gb, it would be worth it.

But I don’t think you could train the average Western worker to become a BGA solder worker and reflasher and have them work for you for more than 6 months before racing to a higher paying job.

This. I worked at a small cell phone repair store. We could replace lots of parts in say an iPhone 7, but nearly no soldering. Parts are relatively cheap (lcd might be 35$ for the 7 when I was there) - and we were only paid up to 12/14$ an hour (that's nearing McDonald's level).

There is little proper education for something like BGA soldering, and if there is then you're more likely to get a job as an engineer.

That's tragic, ignorance costs a lot more than education in the long run

I've got very similar experience in Akihabara, Tokyo.

Trivial thing happened to my headphones. The wire broke very close to the jack plug because of the frequent bending. There was a young guy there, I told him what happened using my broken Japanese, he patiently listened, took the headphones, made some basic check on them, took my phone number and told me to come in 30 minutes. In 20 minutes I got call that it's done. When it came to payment he asked me how much, I think, I should pay. I've been oblivious so he proposed 500 JPY, which is close to nothing, considering that I've had no tools and spare parts.

London, UK - the same situation happened. I've been told to throw it away.

If it was for the same headphones, maybe you should throw them away if that keeps reoccurring.

UK spent over 50 years looking down on "doing" trades, the engineers, technicians, repairers etc, and been brainwashed that converting to a service economy is better for all. Industry and manufacturing was closed as a matter of policy, even in sectors we still competed well.

UK has destroyed the supply chains, the experience, or the ability to train or employ such people any more except in very exceptional cases. End result is few have even seen a jack plug or mains plug that's not moulded or would know where to start.

So we have shops that have no idea how to fix a broken plug or cable, and jewellers that have to return a watch to the manufacturer for a battery change. I'd guess in 1980-1990 most shops on Tottenham Court Road could have soldered a new one, along with most similar shops around the country now they're all just box shifters.

This is not specific to UK, I'd hazard that the whole western world is like that.

You litteraly cannot find ANY electronics shop in Paris (there were still a few ones a few years ago), and no one apart from some non-profits initiative is willing to even open a piece of electronics to do some simple repairs that involve soldering (the only repair being done is changing a part on phones/tablets/computers).

It's really depressing, because a lot repairs are really simple (unsolder a capacitor that is visibly broken, solder a new one in, or even replace a fuse in audio equipment) and instead those objects are trashed, contributing to the growing ecological problems.

That state of affair comes from both an economic lens (manpower is too costly compared to buying a new one), and a skill shortage (people watch me like an alien when I do those simple repairs)

If you are in Versailles there is Vart Électronique. I once needed a cable or something and thought I would need to order it on AliExpress.

I gave them a call and 15 min of biking later I had what I needed for a few euros.

The shop is an inscriptible mess but the guys running it are ok.

Do you remember where did you go for fixing your headphones?

Sorry for late reply, I was away on holidays. It's Bromley East St. Small PC/laptop repair shop. I couldn't find any general electronic/electric repair shop. They told me that cables are too thin and the thing is not worth the work in general. As a result I've got a soldering iron and working headphones at home - fixed it myself.

They do this because repair fraud is still a huge problem in China. If they take your laptop or iPhone into a back room to repair it, 9 times out of 10 they are going to swap out other components with faulty ones (hence getting more repair business down the line along with a non faulty component to use later). I’ve been caught by that scam once in Beijing when I needed my baseband replaced, they swapped out the entire internals and it broke again a week later.

Everyone in the know insists on being there for the repairs to make sure no shenanigans occur. So the reputable places do it in front of you and explain what they are doing so you don’t feel cheated later if something else breaks.

And the more clever crooks make up some excuse like being out of stock on some part then lead you away while a partner does the swapping.

Meanwhile, in my town (pop 1.4 million in South America) nobody can fix anything anymore and the electronics shops are turning into lighting or computer stores.

I couldn't get a ribbon cable last month from what used to be the best electronics shop in town!

The same thing happened to Radioshack[0] in North America. Then it became The Source[1] in Canada.

You can still get some parts at The Source these days, but not all of them, and not nearly as expansive a selection.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack

[1] https://www.thesource.ca/

To be clear, Radioshack and Circuit City were two distinct companies in the US. From a cursory look at Wikipedia, Circuit City was liquidated in 2009 (and later revived), and Radioshack is still operating stores.

Radioshack is still around, but has scaled back extremely.

From thousands of operating stores to 500. Had a few in our area all close, so instead of 2-3 miles, now requires 20 miles to get to one. Effectively to some towns/cities it feels like Radioshack is no more because of such a drastic hit to their footprint.

Yeah—that Wikipedia link goes into the more complex history.

I just remember the RadioShack near my hometown that was full of walls of components. Now you're lucky to find a blank F-connector at The Source in the largest city in the country. Sentimentality got to me.

That said—for other Torontonians, or visitors, there's an awesome (edit: AWESOME) shop on College St between Spadina and Bathurst called Creatron: https://www.creatroninc.com/ (and surprisingly don't discount Long and McQuade [repair shop, Bloor St] for good quality pots and switches, albeit at a markup).

If you can wait for 2 days, then you can use Digikey. It is the best thing we have in America for parts. That and Mouser.

Yes! Well acquainted! They were the go-to wholesalers when I was in film/tv. It’s just not the same as wandering into the shop and getting to know people there. Especially for personal interest/development or hobby projects.

Is this brain drain or the result of some sort of legislation?

More likely liability and labor with those skills moving to better paying jobs.

Doing BGA rework with the right tools is pretty trivial. You can teach the average high school kid to do this stuff but it's not worth it when they could just go to college and learn circuit design or programming to create a design for a less educated technician to build. If they'd rather learn the rework, there are plenty of places that will hire them for more than what someone would pay to have their phone potentially destroyed.

I think it's a combination of factors. Vocational education has never been valued (people want college degrees), and also electronics have become cheap (and harder to fix). The country has also been slowly deindustrializing in the last decades.

I think what is happening it that it much cheaper to make something in China than to repair it locally. If you spend half the cost of a new thing to repair it, you may just buy a new thing.

Yes, but its also because just about every business in the US adhears to the "what the market will bear" rather than "quality product at a fair price" idea.

That and regulatory capture (think plumbers/ac repair/etc) mean that while the part may cost $25 retail, and it only takes 5 minutes to replace they can get away with charging $400 for it (happened to me recently) because they know its going to cost you more to replace it. Appliance repair is going the same way, as is automobile repair at a lot of dealers/name brand chains. The smaller guys will replace an alternator for $40+parts, but your going to be looking at 250+marked up parts at a lot of places. I had the dealer quote me $800 for a door lock, that I ended up fixing mysel for $2 in ebay parts and an hour in labor last year.

Its not always regulatory capture. I tried to get my TV fixed a few years back at some third party repair shop and they still wanted a minimum of $200 to maybe fix it vs me buying a new TV for $300. There is no regulatory capture for TV set repair... just the expenses for the repair shop to stay open.

This isn't unique to any specific region, so I would guess it has to do with density of relevant industries and individuals and the rise of e-commerce. As an example, the San Francisco Bay Area used to be full of shops like Halted, Weird Stuff, Frys (back when they were healthy, not the hollowed out shell that exists today), and Radio Shacks where you could get pretty much any component, module, or development tool that you needed as a hobbyist or small company in the hardware space. What has changed in the last decade though is you can now get access to a much broader range of parts and tools relatively quickly from Mouser, Digikey, SparkFun, Amazon, etc and an even broader set slowly from AliExpress.

There are very few places remaining where there is enough density of need in immediate parts, live debugging, or cottage industry-style production to sustain markets like the one in Shenzhen. Worse, decline in one part of the market (dev tools for examples) would result in a decline in visitors and business adjacencies that speed the decline of the other parts.

Aside from Shenzhen, I'm only aware of Akibahara (smaller and more consumer focused) and some of the markets in Seoul (one of which is smaller and consumer focused, and the other which is more machining/tooling cottage industry focused).

Still worth it for Apple devices since they charge a ridiculous amount to fix something.

I’d say this is a consequence of our outsourcing the manufacture of these products. Repairing electronics is a related skill to developing/manufacturing them. It makes sense that the economy we hire to build these products would also be best at repairing them.

This sounds like descriptions I've read of what Akihabara in Tokyo used to be like before it transformed into its current state as the anime otaku Mecca. There's still a small electronics market area there but it's hard to imagine what it once was with everything else so changed around it.

That was my thought as well. I went to Akihabara in 1997 and it was still glorious. Evidently that spirit has now moved to Shenzhen.

Damn sounds like the dream place from a cyberpunk era

> my friend had his iPhone upgraded from 16GB to 128GB storage

How does this work? I’d have thought those flash chips would be something customised specifically for Apple and contain some kind of authentication system or preprogrammed ROM with immutable firmware - or at least have the IMEI number burned into it somewhere - surely there’s some mechanism for an iPhone to detect unofficial (or unofficially installed) storage chips and prevent booting?

Are they sourcing actual Apple chips that get leaked or diverted out of Apple’s presumably locked-down supply-chain?

At least for the older models, they used standard flash chips (eMMC?) --- there wouldn't have been official Apple models with that large of a capacity at the time anyway.

I don't think there is much to customise in a flash chip.

There comes a point where a part is so basic and integral to the device that putting these kind of protections is outright impossible - without them the phone might not exist as a computing device.

It's amazing that you had to go to China to get a idea of how Capitalism should actually work.

Freed markets for the win.

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