A comparable town in the US would absolutely have a local or franchise repair business doing those things. What neither of them will have in abundance are shops replacing BGA modules as an upgrade. For that it'd be major cities only.
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.