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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

Step 1: stop soldering USB-C ports to the boards on your thinkpad line as they are NOT replaceable and will end the entire machine if damaged. That is the aforementioned T14 gen 3 in the article.

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Oh it's funny you say that, I have a T495 and one of the USB-C ports has stopped working.

Luckily there's another one I can charge from but it really feels like a ticking time bomb.

Yeah my ex wife threw something at me and broke the only USB-C on my old T470. Fortunately it has an old charge port.

I guess that's part of why she's your ex-wife?

I don't do a lot of hardware, but they really aren't ? You couldn't remove it and solder another connector in it's place?

Usually no. If you damage the connector it tears the traces off the board irreparably. If it doesn't do that then there are two rows of pins which need to be resoldered. One row is under the connector. It is near impossible to solder those properly without non trivial equipment. Usually if you get a repair they solder only one pair of pins to the board and that means your USB connector only works plugged in one way up.

This is one reason amongst many that I'm not a particularly big fan of USB-C

Nope, and it's more and more common. I had to trash a $2k monitor due to faulty USB C connector. They require full board replacement.

What stops you from desoldering the bad connector and soldering on a new one?

SMD rework sucks if you're not used to it.

It sucks if you are used to it!

Not in my experience.

But dense SMD connectors with heat sensitive parts and damaged boards more than just suck.

Assuming you can find the part "full board replacement" may not be as bad as it sounds for a monitor. Your main point still stands though, ideally a faulty connector shouldn't require to replace anything besides the connector itself.

That's wild. Even on my "highly unrepairable" MBA M1 the USB-C ports are very easily replaceable (new board costs $20)

Yeah Apple do it right on their machines, at least the laptops. There is no excuse not to do this for other vendors but it costs fractionally more so they push the risk on to the users.

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