Hacker News Reader

Comment by MountDoom | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com