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Comment by xpressvideoz | Hacker News Reader

I've appreciated LG's adventurous moves. The one I liked the most was LG Optimus 3D, which provided a naked-eye 3D display similar to that of Nintendo 3DS. The most recent LG Wing, I was hopeful.

But LG also left a bad taste in my mouth. The last LG phone I used, Nexus 5X, died all of a sudden, but after months of despair, I could revive it using a freaking hair dryer.[1] Yeah, some of you who are well versed to soldering may not be surprised by this, but the fact that such a huge company makes such a minor mistake completely turned me down. My reaction might be irrational, but after the incident I could not get close to newer LG phones anymore.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Nexus6P/comments/66wsvq/this_might_...

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My iPhone 4S had broken WiFi chip which I revived with hair dryer as well. Should I draw conclusions about Apple? Every device has a possibility of defects.

Well the thing is that Apple gave me an on the spot replacement for a broken Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip.

LG requires a shipment from Australia to Asia and a 3-4 week turn-around time.

Yeah nah...

If it was a car you would have just taken it to the local repair shop and hopefully it's an affordable repair but phones don't have that and so when they die, and they all do, it's quite harrowing (unless you are super rich).

You definitely can repair your phone. There are repair masters who can replace chips on the board. This is common in Kazakhstan and Russia at least.

>Kazakhstan

What's the typical income in this country, in America if you're talking about a $700 phone, and you make $70,000 a year it's not completely unreasonable to replace it every year.

But if you're making $15,000 a year, spending $30 to repair your $700 phone makes much more sense.

Average salary is $6,000 a year. But those numbers are according to the official statistics and I don't think those are true because of huge gray economy sector. I think that it's more like $3,000-$4,000 a year for most people (but those numbers are after all taxes, we usually don't pay taxes from our salaries, our employer takes care of that).

I agree that's one of the reasons that repair is more common. Very few people would darn torn socks, because those are cheap enough just to buy them.

This is actually a bit fascinating to me, so do people tend to buy much cheaper phones to begin with. I know in many parts of Eastern Europe iPhones aren't nearly as popular due to the expense.

I've had to replace a battery once ( on a Nexus 4)and I will never go through that again.

Generally people tend to buy cheaper phones. But iPhones are kind of exception, some people are so obsessed with iPhones that they're trying to get loan to buy iPhone. It's not really logical decision, they just want to look more wealthy than they are, it's kind of luxury item.

People take out loans for IPhones in the US too.

You also have bizzario phone deals where if you pay 2 to 3x as much for service you can get a free IPhone. I personally buy a phone for 300$ or so every year or 2. Right now I pay about 30$ a month for 2 lines, but you can definitely spend 150$ a month for 2 lines plus financed phones.

Americans love ZERO down deals, so you can get you and your partner IPhones and worry about paying em next month.

The LG G4 (which I had) was also plagued by a similar issue, you could put the logic board into an oven for half an hour and if you were lucky that would resolve the issue. For me, it only helped for 5 minutes or so, then it broke again. The support did not help at all because I had unlocked the bootloader, even though it was an hardware issue (I was in Spain back then).

Yeah similar experience my nexus 5X, and G4, both failed fairly quickly and I wasn't game to try LG after 2 in a row with issues.

My G3: SIM card reader error. I had inserted the SIM card once, at the AT&T store when I bought it. It was days out of the one year warranty and LG wouldn't help at all.

Wife's G3: Video chip error. Same source as the above failure: solder fails. Broken solder joints on BGA chips and card readers. Hers was just within warranty, but they had no G3s to offer, so she was given a G4. Guess what happened to the G4? Same failure. No further help.

In contrast, my Samsung Galaxy Victory from 2012 still works fine (carried it for two years). My Samsung S8+ works fine after carrying it nearly four years. My Moto G3 works fine after five years and having carried it for two.

The problem is LG. Good riddance.

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