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Comment by isykt | Hacker News Reader

I always hear about how modern laptops and smartphones “aren’t repairable” and then I spent a week in Shenzhen.. where there were floors and floors of independent repair people doing specialized fixes to the most intricate parts. I had an old Apple Watch repair for about $20, only to discover that I got ripped off — I could have negotiated it down to much less.

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With "repairable" people mean repairs with freely available tools, parts and (ideally) schematics.

Apple and others put in a lot of effort to stop independent repair shops from sourcing original parts or making them impossible to successfully replace due to hardware DRM. It is already impossible to upgrade some Macs with more RAM because they will simply refuse to boot if they find more RAM than they got in the factory.

Can you provide a reference for this? My web search didn't find a result.

Look up Lewis Rossman, he runs a repair shop and complains all the time about this

And he is one of the worst eigjt-to-repair advocates there are, given how often he even gets the most basic stuff wrong when it allows to create attention.

What is a better advocate that you'd recommend

He certainly the most well known. I actually don't know of any others, do you?

> how often he even gets the most basic stuff wrong

Such as? That's an outlandish claim unless you have receipts to back it up.

He does get things wrong occasionally, he's only human after all, but he tends to publish very public retractions which is more than can be said for professional journalists.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36148696

You'll have to elaborate. Are you trying to convince me that the lead developer of Graphene (strcat) harassing Rossmann over a tame Youtube comment somehow reflects badly on Louis?

That's certainly a take, but not one that I can ever agree with.

Many components in an iPhone are paired to the logic board from the factory, so if they need to be replaced you have no choice but to go down the Apple sanctioned repair path (although the third party industry goes to great lengths to work around it). Some components, like the display, will show a warning notification in iOS for weeks and disable features like True Tone and auto-brightness if swapped with a third party part. Other components such as the cameras can't even be swapped between 100% genuine iPhones.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/82867/iphone-15-teardown-reveals...

The iPhone 6 disabled Touch ID when the home button was replaced but it'd still function fine as a button - until you restored the phone, which would fall over with an arbitrary error code forcing you to take the phone in to Apple for repair. There was a lot of backlash before they caved and fixed the update process: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple...

It's about ease though.

On a desktop pc you can repair anything pretty easily. Some things we wouldn't even call a repair. A new monitor is call just that. A new screen for a phone is much more involved.

And then there's granularity.

Can that broken usb port be replaced or does it require a new motherboard.

Your $20 Apple watch repair has 2 components. The parts cost and the labour cost.

If the repair takes 2 hours by a skilled technician that's going to cost more than a 5 minute job that anyone can do. And in first world countries, it's probably labour that will dominate.

Shenzhen - where stolen iPhones magically appear on Find My because they are getting used for parts.

It's not truly repairable if no parts are available.

Just wait a few years... :D

I think when we generally talk about whether something is "repairable" we're referring to the ease of repair, which translate to the repair being affordable and makes economical sense so people actually do it vs buying a replacement.

Without any extraordinary effort and having only typical DIY skills, I have repaired a half-dozen of my family members' iPhones that people complain are "not repairable".

To me, "repairable" means "capable of being repaired in a practical way". I'll also grant you the unstated "at a reasonable price", which for me, having a cheapskate nature, I've always found the repair parts (batteries, screens, and buttons) to be extremely reasonable in price.

For people who don't want to DIY it, most every mall has a kiosk that will do it for 2-3x what I paid, but still <15% of the price of a new iPhone.

Ok how about this: "The company hasn't made any design choices with the express purpose of making repair more difficult."

I still look at the outcome. If a manufacturer puts a Torx screw instead of a Philips, was that choice made to make it harder to repair? What about a Security Torx instead of a Torx? What about a Pentalobe or Tri-wing instead of a Phillips? A Triple-Square instead of a hex socket? If they glue in the battery which serves to protect the battery and also makes it more difficult to repair?

"If it can be repaired in a practical way, it's repairable" seems more resilient and probably no more a judgment call than the design questions above.

Repairable means I can replace most major components in my laptop (wifi, ram, battery, SSD, BT, etc) with nothing more than a torx and screw driver. No soldering, or specialized equipment.

This is obviously somewhat subjective, but to me soldering does not disqualify something being "repairable", unless it requires a proprietary soldering machine or something. What you're describing sounds "modular"

When a repair requires soldering, it significantly reduces the number of people who can do that repair themselves. I can do it, but most of my non-technical friends could not, even though several of them could replace a hard drive or even a DIMM in their desktop PC.

On thinking about it more I agree with you. A very simply soldered thing is maybe ok, but the vast, vast majority of soldered things are no-gos for repairs for non-pros. It's too easy to damage components and destroy the board, even if you know how to do it. If the Framework required soldering, I'd be very critical about it's repairability/modularity, so I'm being inconsistent.

Conclusion: soldering is not ok for repairability

I don't think it should be required that my grandma should be able to fix it for it to qualify as repairable. There are tons of phone repair shops that do battery and screen swaps. I'm sure if the devices were even moderately more repairable and parts existed they would be happy to do a lot more with expert knowledge. I wouldn't mind if I could take my device to these shops and get it fixed. Sure, doing it myself may be a nice bonus but I think we can let some people specialize. What I don't think is acceptable is if only the original manufacture can source parts or perform repairs (if they decide to at all)

Add power supplies to that list. In my experience it's by far the most common component to die, and sometimes it's hopelessly and needlessly integrated.

Shenzhen isn't a good example here. In Shenzhen you can ask people to upgrade your laptop's RAM by unsoldering it, but usually those laptops are considered nonupgradable everywhere else in the world.

You don't pay the plumber to bang on the pipes, you pay him to know which pipes to bang on.

It works in Shenzhen because the device makers can't stop it. In most other countries they actively do (e.g. cirumventing DRM is a crime)

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