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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a repair tech, but I do enjoy watching them work and I suspect they'd strongly disagree with you. It is always useful to know part numbers and how they are connected with each other even of the components are themselves "black boxes".

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> It is always useful to know part numbers

In modern phones the key part numbers for ICs aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy.

At best, you can see the part numbers for the passives and their alternate suppliers. The part numbers for most of the actives aren't going to be useful to anyone outside of the manufacturing chain for these parts. A repair tech would simply source the donor parts from an identical phone model.

> aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy

...on the open market.

However, if your repair shop exists just down the street from one of Apple's component supplier's factories, then knowing the part number of one of the ICs or other actives, might be enough to let you walk in there one day and submit a hand-written PO for a few boxes of said part (...as a cash transaction, of course.)

Eh. YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty. You just replace the PCB or tell the customer to buy a new phone.

Your original comment talked about "most commodity PCBs," but it sounds like you really meant to limit your scope to phone PCBs.

Laptops, motherboards, microwave ovens and whatever else has "commodity PCBs" are much more repairable than the highly size-optimized phone market.

Not cost-effective for a repair shop in the US, but in other countries with lower cost of living, including China and many Asian countries, technicians go to great lengths to replace individual components on PCB boards.

They are doing some wild stuff in Asia like adding physical SIM card slots to eSIM only iPhones (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Ja_x7JI0w). I imagine having schematics like this would be at least marginally helpful in developing those techniques.

> YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty.

My mom's Samsung phone suddenly failed to charge a year ago, but in a weird way. Tried some tricks but it ended up getting stuck on a black screen during boot.

I handed it to a repair shop in town that had good reviews. Three days later they called back. I asked what was wrong, and it turned out they had to replace one charging chip, a power sequencing chip and a third chip I can't recall the purpose of, along with the USB port. The reason it took so long was they got a bit further for each chip they swapped.

I'm in Norway where prices are high, and we have a 25% VAT on top. I paid $180 including VAT, or $144 before VAT.

For that I might have gotten a very cheap Android phone on sale, however my mom's phone was a premium model from a few years earlier. Besides, less e-waste and saved me time reinstalling everything. Personally I think the repair was well worth it.

There's discussion here in Norway to drop VAT on repair jobs such as this, and in that case I think it would definitely make sense to repair such cases.

I'd argue that VAT is just a bad way to do taxes in general. The only thing it really accomplishes is slowing down the economy. Much better to target wealth/income instead IMO.

Much better to target resource extraction. That will have an immediate and very positive effect on the environment because it will make recycling so much cheaper than using virgin resources.

You are the reason why we have so much e-waste

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