Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US | Hacker News Reader

Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

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97 pointsmikece63 comments

Samsung has been providing iFixit with genuine parts since at least the S20. Although this is a good first step it came with a huge major caveat:

Screen+battery are only provided as a single assembly. You can't buy them separately.

These are the two most common repairs on a smartphone and to get a simple battery you need to buy the expensive screen.

I am hopeful Samsung redeems themselves this year especially with the introduction of the Fold5 to this program. Otherwise this is nothingburger only meant to appease regulators and legislators

> These are the two most common repairs on a smartphone and to get a simple battery you need to buy the expensive screen.

This is indeed really dumb and it's still the same for the S23 parts which have just been released on the European store https://samsungselfrepair.shop

They're not on iFixit yet for the US but I assume it's the same story.

You can definitely buy the battery only, at least for the S21 Ultra, as I just went through that. https://www.ifixit.com/products/galaxy-s21-ultra-replacement...

That's an aftermarket part.

Yeah I would definitely not use that. Aftermarket parts can be fine but with batteries I don't take risks.

That's really odd. I worked in samsung parts for a few years. While screen/frame assemblies were very common, the battery was always separate. Batteries generally got stored separately, and shipping requirements also provide some onus to keep them apart.

Particularly after seeing the pull adhesive strips in Pixel/iPhone I thought that would have become the norm.

This is a great move. Google committed to 7 years of parts as well via iFixit.

Of course, paired with the extra long support it now seems like Samsung is also possibly going to subscription models where they force you to pay to not have features taken away, so maybe it won't turn out well. Who knows.

Google only does it for phones though. If you have a watch and you break the screen, their only solution is to just buy a new one. Even though replacement isn't hard. They just don't bother making spare parts available. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/11-months-after-laun...

I'm a little disappointed. My S22+ charging port is broken and the part on ifixit is 60$. IIRC the Samsung repair shop quoted me the fix to be 80$. Doesn't really seem like I'm saving enough to justify my labour and potential to break it due to lack of expertise. I highly doubt that component is actually worth 60$

Of course, the pricing is meant to disincentivise you from doing it. Apple is doing the exact same ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwgpTDluufY ). They don't want to enable DIY repair but they do this because they have to in some areas.

I assume this is also the reason they won't just sell you a battery without a screen.

This is great. The main reason people change phone in the last couple years has been for battery degradation and screen breakage. Changing those for many people is not an option because is not really possible to get the same quality parts as OEM afterwards.

Also because of flash memory degradation. You may notice that older devices are slow even after a full factory reset. The memory chips are reaching their limits.

Flash memory doesn't slow down as it ages.

Doesn't it degrade with use? I thought with modern wear leveling you get degraded performance for a long time before it just stops working, but I'm no expert. I'd love to learn more about this actually

What may be the cause that the storage gets slower on older devices is, if they are nearly full. At least I heard this about SSDs. Please someone correct me if I remember this incorrectly

It does degrade, but not performance. The degrading happens when blocks hit their wear limit and can no longer be used. Flash memory typically includes additional blocks to replace those that are at their wear limit, but that will eventually exhaust and then the drive will be in a failure state. This can sometimes be that the drive stops working, or that it shrinks it's capacity, but the bandwidth and access speed characteristics remain constant throughout it's life.

How does a storage device shrink in capacity, and by what mechanism is that shrinkage communicated with the filesystem?

That's determined by the firmware and the manufacturer.

Flash isn't like disks. You don't write to a block that's on a certain cylinder on a certain platter. You write a block and the memory controller determines where it will be stored, usually based on some wear leveling algorithm.

It's one of the reasons you can't securely delete a flash drive.

The question remains.

Handwaving about how flash is different than disks isn't an answer to how shrinkage is conveyed to the filesystem (and isn't a meaningful differentiator anyway, since common spinny-disks haven't been 1:1 mappings for well over 3 decades, themselves).

> The degradation increases the amount of negative charge in the cell over time due to trapped electrons in the oxide and negates some of the control gate voltage, this over time also makes erasing the cell slower, so to maintain the performance and reliability of the NAND chip, the cell must be retired from use.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

IIRC from when I worked making microcontrollers, there is a feedback loop on the erase that makes sure the bits all read 1 as they should. This takes longer based on how many write/erase cycles have occurred.

I’d have loved to find an actual data sheet to show you as an example, but here is something I found:

https://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/arm-based-microc...

> The erase time is worst case for a single sector when doing sector erase, or the whole bank if doing bank erase. In bank erase all the sectors are being erased at the same time so the time of the bank erase is equal to the time to erase the slowest sector.

> Erase time degrades with the number of write erase cycles. Sometimes during erase traps (an extra electron or hole stuck in the oxide lattice) are formed in the erase oxide. These traps make the next erase harder. Some of the traps will anneal with time and high temperature.

Flash memory does not erase during user actions. TRIM is done async

It’s a good point, but the blanket statement isn’t true. Not all flash memory devices support TRIM.

Flash memory is always erased during user-initiated writes in instances where trim is not used, or when there are not enough known-erased blocks to hold the write -- for whatever reasons these conditions may exist.

At a low level, a block of flash can't be written without being first erased. It might have been erased previously (which is ideal), but it might also might need to be erased immediately (which is much slower) in order for to perform a write operation.

And a trim command doesn't guarantee erasure of a low-level flash block -- it's up to the controller to sort out that out on its own.

> Flash memory is always erased during user-initiated writes in instances where trim is not used

Great answer but slight nit pick: In my world (embedded) the flash on (some? dare I say most?) microcontrollers is only erased when you specifically tell it to erase. You can write to sectors multiple times without erasing. You can even write to the same word multiple times, as long as you only want to turn 1’s to 0’s. If you want to turn any 0 to a 1 in the whole sector then that’s when the erase comes in.

This gives interesting use-cases where you can count up using individual bits without a time-consuming/power-using/cycle-consuming erase.

Solid nit pick. I appreciate it.

(And somewhere in the back of my head I knew of this method of writing useful things to flash. It certainly has at least a couple of efficiency advantages that can be important in some cases, even if they're not the kinds of things that would be important or even usable with a consumer-oriented flash device that is operated from a high level.)

The Z Fold 5 is seriously expensive, so being able to replace a broken part myself could save a ton of cash. Plus, it's gotta be super satisfying to fix something that folds like magic.

I imagine the cost of official parts such as the screens for flagships like the Fold 5 are still going to be very expensive. Even if you need to only replace a simple/cheap part it will likely be a major pain that requires removal of the screens which if you haven't done before could result in you breaking something expensive.

Personally for such delicate devices I would rather pay the difference for someone with the experience and liability to fix it for me.

This is huge for tech nerds like me! Samsung's DIY repair program is like getting a superpower to fix my own stuff

This is cool, they even have some parts like the buttons and glass in different colours. So you could even use it to pimp your phone (I wouldn't break the waterproofing just for that but if you need to get in there anyway...)

One thing that's annoying though is that with the S23 you need to buy a new screen when you want to change the battery. The battery is only available as a screen+battery kit. Weird.

I mean, when you replace the screen it makes sense to stick a new battery in, sure. Especially because the old battery might be a few years older or have damage from the impact (safety). The other way around, not so much. Why waste a perfectly good screen just to change the battery? This is really dumb and drives the price up. It also causes unnecessary e-waste.

Now, this is in Europe where Samsung have a real parts shop of their own ( https://samsungselfrepair.shop ), I see in the US it's different because it has to go through iFixit somehow. Edit: Nope, iFixit doesn't seem to sell batteries separately either.

Maybe it is because to many people break the screen when they try to replace the battery.

Could be but they can still go and buy one separately when they need it then.

I am currently looking for a new reliable OLED TV. Knowing they added the S90C to their repair program is very reassuring.

My dad just got the 83 incher and it's magnificent. Unfortunately, it looks like they only added the 77, but who knows what the future holds.

I’d definitely recommend LG TVs over Samsung, especially in the mid / high end range. The OS is so much better to use and you don’t get served up ads if you don’t want them.

Samsung should get the memory card slot back. Heck, I still miss easily replaceable battery from Galaxy S5!

In general, I hate how Galaxy S series is just becoming more and more like an iPhone. (Well, other than reasonably long firmware update support. Great job Samsung copying that!)

I used to have both Samsung Galaxy S and iPhone — but now it's just iPhone.

But yeah, DIY repair is great and there I wish Apple would follow in good faith.

>Samsung should get the memory card slot back.

They still have models with SD card slots, but they're never coming back to flagships because:

1. so they can milk you on cloud storage or on the expensive variants with more storage

2. access speed difference of UFS 4.0 vs fast SD cards is huge and unacceptable on a flagship that's supposed to compete with iPhones on speed

3. biggest and most important reason I learned from the horses mouth, people used to put the cheapest junkiest "value" SD cards off Amazon in them, which would be slow and negatively impact UX, and would also spontaneously die, taking the customers photos with them, so then the angry customers would blame the phone for both issues("your damn phone ate my photos/sd-card!"), so they had remove it to ensure UX and reliability across the board

>>so they can milk you on cloud storage

Samsung doesn't sell cloud storage though, so I'm not sure that's a valid reason. With apple it's obvious, with Samsung I don't see it.

>Samsung doesn't sell cloud storage though

Google, Dropbox and Microsoft do and they all partnered with Samsung at one point or another to ofer promotion or be defaults on their phones.

The assumptions you have to make to arrive at the conclusion that Samsung doesn't put SD card slots in their phones so that people buy cloud storage from Microsoft seem a little excessive.

It is excessive because that's not what I said. It's what you're saying.

Well, what are you implying in your post then?

I'm implying exactly what I just said before.

Google and Microsoft (and Dropbox at one point) are partners of Samsung, so Samsung got paid by them to feature their products preinstalled on their phones and push certain promotions with their phones(free 1TB of cloud storage for one year or something like that).

So it stands to reason that if Samsung were to offer crazy amount of NAND storage out of the box, then then their partners in the cloud business would not be very happy, now would they?

Not that it's the main reason why they're not incentivized to put lot of NAND by default, but these partnerships can't help either.

I'm just explaining putting 2+2 together here guys, as I though the implication was obvious to everyone.

I'm so freaking confused. The person you replied to said this exact same thing, but you called them out on it. And when I pressed you on that point.....you just repeated what they said? Eh?

>I'm so freaking confused.

I already explained my thought process as best I can. I don't know what more to do.

>The person you replied to said this exact same thing

They didn't say the same thing, to my understanding. Maybe language barrier and cultural differences mean there's a confusion here.

Unclad5968 said what you said.

You claim Samsung keeps sd cards off phones because they are motivated to by partners.

Unclad said "it seems excessive to think Samsung is doing keeping sd cards off phones because of partners".

You and they disagree, but he stated your position accurately I believe.

No, I think I was right to disagree. He said Samsung doesn't put larger storage to sell Microsoft cloud storage.

I said that's false because Samsung doesn't put larger storage for mainly other reasons, but if they did put larger storage, then it would be a conflict of interest with their cloud storage partners, so they have an extra incentive to stick to this, but it's not the main one like (I understand) he claimed.

> 3. biggest and most important reason I learned from the horses mouth, people used to put the cheapest junkiest "value" SD cards off Amazon in them, which would be slow and negatively impact UX, and would also spontaneously die, taking the customers photos with them, so then the angry customers would blame the phone for both issues, so they had remove it to ensure UX and reliability across the board

Thanks, that's really interesting and a bit disappointing to be honest. I wonder if optionally "bundling" high quality microSD cards at the time of sale might've helped?

> I wonder if optionally "bundling" high quality microSD cards at the time of sale might've helped?

High quality SD cards have always existed but consumers have been avoiding them because "the other one's much cheaper and I'm no sucker to pay more for the same amount of storage".

Also, Amazon is full of counterfit SD cards. That's why we can't have nice things.

So it's understandable phone makers are trying to avoid these extra hassles causing consumer frustration and support tickets.

(3) is interesting, but when you are the phone manufacturer that has to be so easy to mitigate:

- slow = notification with "slow photo write to SD card, use a better SD card for better performance"

- failure = they could offer a built-in app with reliability stats for the SD card currently inserted

At Samsung's size and amount of money to solve these problems, the skeptic in me feels like (3) is a convenient excuse for (1), or to excuse just copying what Apple does.

Assuming the average user wants to look at apps or believe the phone sure. If not there's no winning here and I can see why making it so the user just can't mess up on choosing storage and doesn't have to be presented all this information/responsibility when they do is still a much better image of the phone's storage quality.

Doesn't mean it's any less aligned with getting to charge more for storage. Just means it can still make plenty of sense as an excuse. Power users have consistently turned out to be a poor target for phone makers.

Your suggestion feels like a lot more work and effort that still leads to terrible UX, slow phones and unhappy customers.

1. Customers being nagged their SD card is slow will hate the phone, not just the SD card they just bought and can't return. How will the users know which cards are fast enough? Most average users are not tach savvy at all and are easily duped by marketing fluff.

2. SD cards can also die out of the blue. Good luck trying to predict when with an app. You might as well just offer them data recovery services while you're at it for when they loose all their photos.

It's easier to just skip SD cards and offer fast and solid UFS storage at a higher cost, that you can vouch for, instead of something that could always be flaky for reasons outside of your control.

Wow. It looks like I must upgrade my phone soon. So far I hung up on the missing audio jack, but I didn't realize the SD card is also missing in Galaxy S. WTF, this sucks.

Not sure if you're sarcastic or not, but SD cards have been absent from flagship Androids for about 10 years now. Wait till you find out the batteries are not swappable anymore.

Galaxy S10+ came out in 2019. I believe this was the last flagship to have a microSD card slot.

Interesting. I had a OnePlus 3 since early 2016 and that already dropped the SD card slot for UFS storage way back then so I assumed all flagships did the same.

Galaxy S20 definitely has a microsd-slot. At least some models.

1) Samsung actually stopped their cloud drive service. They have a dumb deal with Microsoft now but they're not really upselling you there anymore. The expensive higher-storage variants yes though.

2) Be aware by the way that on the Samsung S23 and S24 base models you are not even getting UFS 4.0! The 128GB model comes with UFS 3.1 only. All the 256GB models and up are 4.0.

3) Nah.. If they cared about performance and UX they wouldn't sell us the Exynos version in the EU. Point 1 - upselling to a higher version is the real reason.

Point 1 being true (upselling for more money), doesn't negate points 2 (potential cloud partners deals) and 3 (SD cards shitify the UX) also being true.

Regarding Exynos, Devil's advocate take: Most customers won't be able to tell the difference between Exynos or not in real world tasks, but they will definitely tell the difference between reading off SD and UFS.

They don't put Exynos in the US because Qualcom owns that modem market there as even Apple still uses them. Maybe if the EU had any alrge domestic competitors left in these spaces(phone modems and mobile phones), the situation would be different, but since we don't, we're at the mercy of US and Asian giants for selling us their consumer hardware.

The problem is mostly Android. Google gutted the API/usability of SD cards citing security risks.

Not just SD cards. Local storage outside the app private folder has also been completely gutted (replaced with APIs which attempt to unify cloud and local storage).

I re-downloaded the test APK from[0] and tested on my S21 [Android 14]

Legacy storage takes ~2-3ms to create a file. SAF takes ~20-60ms

[0] https://magicbox.imejl.sk/forums/topic/storage-access-framew...

Samsung still makes a phone like that. The Galaxy XCover6 Pro.

https://www.samsung.com/us/business/mobile/phones/galaxy-xco...

The curren iFixit prices even look reasonable. Color me surprised that they seem to actually provide replacements at a reasonable cost and have not mounted a "DIY" program in name only.

It's great, but also a bit sad, that what used to be an industry norm not that long ago (easily accessible repair parts) is now a heavily celebrated news.

Hopefully it's a sign that trends are reverting in the broader industry.

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