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Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

Progress is good to see, but I fear this will still result in only large expensive assembled “components” being made available. Like for a MacBook, instead of being able to buy a $0.02 capacitor replacement, Apple will probably sell the whole mainboard “part” for $2,000.

Edit: I was a bit lazy in my writing and what I really meant were things like inexpensive proprietary power management ICs, NVMe storage modules, and/or T2 security chips, USB controller ICs, etc.

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If a capacitor fails there are two cases:

1. The capacitor is part of a chip. There is no practical way for you to figure out that the capacitor has failed. You will just know at best that the chip is not working right. And even if you could somehow find out that a capacitor on the chip failed there is no practical way you could replace it.

In short, if a capacitor on a chip fails you will need a new chip.

2. It is a discrete capacitor. Probably surface mount soldered onto a PCB, possibly thru-hole soldered onto a PCB, or maybe some other kind of package with leads soldered across something else like the terminals of a switch or something like that.

In this case it is a commodity part. You go to DigiKey or similar, find a capacitor that with the same capacitance, voltage rating, ESR, temperature range, etc,, which will be available from many manufacturers, and DigiKey will be happy to sell it to you for a few cents (plus $7 shipping).

It would be nice if the device maker had to tell you the electrical parameters you need to match when buying a replacements capacitor, but it would be overkill to make all the device makers actually sell such readily available commodity parts.

These are all great points. I was a lazy in my writing and what I really meant were things like inexpensive proprietary power management ICs, NVMe storage modules, and/or T2 security chips, USB controller ICs, etc.

Is there a replaceable capacitor in a MacBook?

https://www.ifixit.com/News/62674/m2-macbook-air-teardown-ap...

https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown

I see several here... is the issue the tight spacing makes it too hard?

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2022/07/18205803/MBA_M...

Yes, at least I would not be able to do it with the household soldering iron I have.

You might not but you could pay a semi-affordable third party repair place like Louis Rossmann to do it for you. That still helps the general consumer, even if its not “DIY”.

You would probably need a microscope and some appropriate tools. Looking at the 10's of thousands of $$ my neighbor has in metalworking tools, there isn't much of a problem asking home enthusiasts to buy some tools to do what they need.

There are repair shops that will replace them for you. With good equipment and a steady hand it's certainly possible.

But if you go to an Apple-certified shop they'll just swap out the entire board and call it a day. In Apple's mind those are not replaceable. In their repair system Apple treats a MacBook as a collection of maybe 20 parts and a bunch of screws.

All of them are replaceable but Apple won't provide the part numbers.

Interesting. I would have assumed anyone with the skill to work on something that tiny would be so expensive as to make repairs not worth it.

They are expensive labor but still less than half the cost of a whole new logic board with CPU, RAM, NVMe, etc. Looking at something like $600 instead of $1200+. Plus with Apple's authorized solution you are guaranteed to lose all your data, whereas third-party repair shops that do board-level repairs may often be able to avoid data loss.

My friend and I both sent our MacBooks into Louis Rossmann the same week. He spilled a cup of water on his, mine just killed itself for no reason. The repairs were expensive but they managed to not lose any data, and it still saved us many hundreds of dollars each vs. doing an Apple-authorized repair.

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