A tale from the trenches fixing an NES
debugger.medium.com
debugger.medium.com
Ever since then I buy budget phones; phone insurance is a scam, phones are intentionally difficult to repair, and I don't want to spend $1k on something fragile that I keep in my pocket that has a high likelihood of being dropped on accident and the only recourse being whatever policy Apple has to benefit itself. I wish we lived in a world where consumer electronics were owned by the user. A 30 year old NES can hold value, I have doubts about what 30 year old smart phones will look like.
I haven't had any experience with lacquer because traditional lacquers almost have to be sprayed, which I am not equipped to do. I have plenty of experience with shellac because you can brush it and get a pretty decent finish off the brush, or French polish for a more refined finish. French polishing takes advantage of the aforementioned properties of shellac: besides laying another thin layer down, you're also redisolving the existing layers and smoothing them as you go.
Traditional varnishes cure by polymerization, and generally cannot be removed with mineral spirits. That isn't to say you won't ruin the finish trying, but you'll need a different solvent if you want it gone cleanly.
[0] lacquer has become an almost meaningless term. There are products that might or might not technically be lacquer that are called lacquer or water borne lacquer or some other phrase that includes the word. I'm referring to the stuff that uses lacquer thinner for the solvent. You'll know it if you smell it: it smells like it's giving you cancer right now, not in 30 years.
If you want silicone you can find it. Here's one example: https://uk.farnell.com/mg-chemicals/422b-340g/chemical-coati...
Either way, excellent video and very well put together. I love seeing stuff like this.
Stop having reviewers point out that extra couple mm as being a "glaring design flaw" or comment on "how extra chunky" the phone is.
FWIW rugged, durable, battery replaceable devices have repeatedly failed on the market. Notably, Motorola tried, and failed. Everyone bought Samsungs.
And it isn't like there are very many phone reviewers for any given market. If someone wanted to organize a letter writing campaign to try and convince the top 5 or 10 phone reviewers to just not mention device thickness that just might have an effect.
(On the flip side reviewers complained about the removal of the headphone jack and that didn't help any so...)
The other thing to remember is that with modern battery charging tech, batteries can last a long time. Samsung is the best in this regard, their chargers are really smart and work hard to preserve battery life.
That said, I do personally wish there were some sort of "minimum repairability" that would potentially put limits on how thin something can be if that made repair much more difficult, but that's a bit of a side-issue to "right to repair" for me.
Is the "an" in the title proper because NES, pronounced, sounds like /ɛn/, even though it's actually a consonant?
In english multiple vowels in a row cause you to take a pause, which is why the -n is added
Worth noting, the other posters are correct in saying that 'a snezz' or 'a ness' is also correct.
Does this work? I thought you might have a chance of success with bending the pins, but most of the time, replacement is the only viable option.
I did always wonder if you could electroplated the pins again in the right solution and voltage.
Everybody seems to want a razor thin phone/laptop/whatever, which makes easy repairs impossible, and treats them as expendable anyway. If it's out of warranty it's obsolete.
The amount of labor to diagnose and replace a chip on a tightly packed motherboard sometimes exceeds the price to replace an entire motherboard.
Consider what people want to repair. It is doubtful that many people would want to do chip level repairs due to the expense. People may want to replace things like keyboards and screens, which are easier to work with since they are independent modules. If people started using their devices for longer periods of times, the battery would likely be a candidate.
Similarly with design. People may desire thin and light, but what is the point where no one will care or notice (short of bragging rights based upon advertising literature rather than utility)?
It is also worth noting that thin and light does not imply that easy repairs are impossible. Companies may try to convince people that the interiors of our devices are bursting at the seams with sophisticated electronics, but the reality is that the screen often dictates the size while the internal PCB uses a fraction of that space. (I have seen thin phones that are screwed together, have user accessible batteries and microSD slots, and even had a snap on panel to hide all of that. Laptops aren't all that different in this respect.)
Sure, they may be able to trim half a millimetre here and there by throwing repairability out the window. On the other hand, it is a high price and less of a trade-off than many will suggest.
Even with cars, manufacturers get away with things like removing an engine to replace glow plugs. With phones and laptops, very few people care if it's repairable. That's unfortunate but it's true.
Given both the complexity and the shoddy engineering of modern software/firmware, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of "hardware" problems are similar.
If it was, it would be legislated just like car manufacturers are forced to carry parts for a number of years for every produced car.
Software repair is a different story of course, but it's another double-edged sword- you wouldn't like your phone's memory to be fully accessible with just a USB cable.
I can't imagine a mechanism that would only allow USB tampering only if the phone is malfunctioning.
Use cryptographic authentication then, with a password/key provided to you when you buy the phone?
Do they? I'd be much happier with a phone that was a little thicker and had a bigger and/or replaceable battery. Apple just doesn't want to sell me that.