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Comment by Elv13 | Hacker News Reader

https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup

But be warned, repairing a Pentium desktop motherboard and repairing a recent Apple laptop are 2 different leagues. I did repair a lot of capacitors / magic_smoke on old desktop/vintage motherboards. You just need an acceptable soldering iron (with real temperature control, not just any junk), a tabletop EE heatgun (not the ones looking like a hair drier), a solder suction pump, your eyes and your nose.

However for modern laptops, you need a digital oscilloscope, logic analyzer, microscope, large reflow oven, vacuum chamber a dozen screw drivers and 5-15k$ worth of professional tools. Good luck with that. In my case, I can't even get my hands steady enough to do the smaller surface mount jobs. There is some wizards on the net who did it so many time they can do away with half of the tools, but unless you did it 500x time on the same model, you wont.

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A number of top apple repair places, like Rossman repair group and iPad rehab, clearly do not use an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, reflow oven, or vacuum chamber on any if the repairs I've seen. You do need a reasonably good soldering iron, hot air tool, multimeter and magnification. The most used tools could probably be assembled in cheaper starter form for $1k, but some repairs would only need a subset of those. And Rossman repair guides will step you through anything that can be done with the smaller art of tools.

I don't know how stay or not your hands are. I've learned that you don't need rock steady hands for most fine hand soldering, but you likely would need them for putting dmm or oscilloscope probes on fine features. I find that good magnification makes it easier to steady my hands.

A multimeter (even a dollar-store one) a very good starting point to see which components have power and can detect issues like shorts on the board. In most of Louis Rossmann's videos he doesn't go further than multimeter + visual examination of the board to figure out which components are bad (or where to start at least).

That's the "there is some wizard in the Internet that did it so many time they can get away with half the tools" part ;). The vacuum chamber is also required only for ipad/iphone/touchbar/apple_watch, not most macbooks.

IMHO, most of these projects end up with "I will totally do this" -> "I am blocked for now, but will come back to this tomorrow" -> "I don't want to lose parts, so I will put the pieces in a plastic bag and 4 ziplocks" -> "I need to move this out to clean my desk" -> "2 years pass" -> "what is that bag, oh, my broken laptop" -> "I will never finish this, there is some room in the trash I need to fill".

/me Looking in from of me and my old ThinkPad W541p stares back at me in pieces. (and yes, I dismantled it yesterday to replace the screen cable and cooling unit. Only to find out the new cooling unit has the wrong connector and fan voltage scaling despite being "a factory part for the W540p")

edit: The last time I did a MBP board was my 2007 Santa Rosa 15". I actually did reflow the GPU with a heat gun, but this was very scary. You move even a tiny bit and kiss the board goodby. I wish I had a reflow oven (I still don't have one big enough). BGA reflows are a nightmare.

An oscilloscope is a waste here besides for teaching purposes where a visual representation of what you're trying to get across eases understanding. Logic analyzer is over the top too. It's one of those things where by the time you understand the output of your logic analyzer, you already have enough of a brain to solve the problem without it

I can give someone who doesn't know how to fix a board in an oscilloscope and they will see strange little vibrations show up when they poke the probe in different parts of the board, but then what?

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