And I can see the logic. Wages are so high that anything that they can't exactly know the repair time and success rate can easily exceed the device value. While in lower income countries they can afford to mess around for quite a while on repairs since the replacement cost is relatively massive.
https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/01/16/professional-line-s...
Sadly in the US the bomb squad would soon show and shoot your ass, but maybe you'd get a settlement out of it.
https://fortune.com/2025/05/18/gen-x-entrepreneur-line-sitti...
We can pay someone $20~60 an hour to stand in line for concert tickets and shoe drops but we can't get enough blue-collar workers to bring down housing prices.
NYC McDonald's pays $17~20 an hour...
Somewhere along the way, what we value for labor and what we work we are willing to do got very messed up.
But why not offer that? All else being equal I'd rather fix something than put it in landfill and buy a new one. Am I the only one?
Had I handed it to them disassembled and asked them to just solder a port on they might have accepted.
In that time they could have done 3 iPhone battery replacements.
Customer: it’s just this specific solder job
“They”: that’s what you say, but there might be other issues, and we cannot tell without spending lots of time checking things
Customer: no, it’s just a solder job.
“They”: OK, we’ll solder that, but the risk is on you, and you’ll pay regardless of the outcome.
Some time later:
“They”: operation succeeded, patient still dead.
What do you think happens next?
A: customer thanks “them” for their effort, pays and leaves
B: customer starts bickering that “they” destroyed their phone, leaves negative reviews online, etc.
I expect a significant percentage for option B. Even if that’s rare, it requires only a few negative reviews to not be worth it.
I can see people wanting to avoid that, even if it effectively leaves money on the table.
so I did a search for anyone doing microsolder repairs nearby, picked the closest, and found someone who diagnosed, quoted, and then replaced both ports, and a chip that had vaporised itself along the way, for a couple hundred AUD.
And it's not that expensive.
The only thing I can imagine is that there is an underground repair business buying broken items to repair them and resell them that was efficient enough to keep the margin between non-working and working that low.
If it is obvious that it only needs an HDMI port then the listing will cost what a regular PlayStation will cost minus HDMI repair and minus ~15% for risk. So about 70% of a regular PlayStation.
Buying for repair only makes sense if you buy undiagnosed in bulk for 30% of the value after repair. You can then also scavenge some for repairs of others.
For reaching out to a seller/merchant, I found it helps significantly if you google translate into Chinese, and just communicate in Chinese.
A modern cellphones have only about 10 replaceable assemblies[1] - repairers aren't typically replacing individual broken chips, an entire assembly/part. "[knowing] what you're looking for" is easy of you know what broke the device, or following basic troubleshooting steps.
Getting into repairs these days is easy; YouTube, Alibaba, Forums/File-sharing sites, USB-C and Open Source firmware-flashing tools have conspired to lower the bar of entry. If you have an old phone in your device drawer with a damaged screen or unusable battery, you probably can fix it yourself, with the right tools and some patience.
1. Cover, chassis, screen, digitizer, mainboard, speaker, mic, daughter-boards, variously cables/ribbons
You can't expect him to waste weekend fixing something for pennies.
Unlike a guy living in shed, driving 20+ yo Daewoo Lanos.
A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away. The chat, diagnosing, and repair took me less than an hour overall so with cheap parts I could have charged someone $40 and made $35 an hour if I had cheap and available parts while saving them $250. But dealing with parts issues nearly triples my minimum price for a business operation because I either have to spend a bunch of time finding the best deal for parts and have this thing sit on my bench for two weeks+ as they ship, or get ripped off paying 80 dollars to get it within a week. And by time they are spending $120 on a repair, they are already nearly half the price of buying something brand new that can be shipped to their door in 2 days with a 2 year manufacturers warranty, so they wouldn't want to attempt to pay someone to repair it at all.
Or from a previous customer who had to replace a whole power supply module, and those parts happened to be perfectly fine on the otherwise broken subassembly they left behind for disposal.
That's how repair efficiency enabled by scale looks like when you zoom in. They'll replace your broken screen in 5 minutes and for 10x less than the price of the replacement screen (!), as long as you let them take the damaged one, because someone will actually fix that damaged part and use it as replacement for the next customer, etc. There is enough volume they can decouple and time-shift actual repair and replacement.
(And of course should they not have a freshly repaired part of a kind, there's probably a booth selling those very parts within 50 meters of where they sit, that's also a direct line to some factory in Shenzhen. You know, the kind of booth where they look at you funny if your answer to "how many pieces" has less than three zeros in it.)
There are a far larger number of people capable of re-soldering RAM on a GPU than there are high-paid professionals so it's not exactly a labour shortage problem.
You shouldn't have to live in a shed in order to run a small business and we know something about our present situation is anomalous because small businesses like this were much more prevalent within living memory and currently exist in other countries.