[Saigonautica]

I was going to skip this article until I read your post, it got me curious. You're totally right, it does read really weird. It made me laugh a bit, I needed that this morning. Thanks!

I have also "spun up my own SMT". It's a 50 USD hot air rework station and maybe 20$ of consumables in a 4 meter square workshop (I live in Asia). It would be challenging, but possible, for me to assemble the PCBs in their photographs by hand. There are indeed a lot of people like me.

[varjag]

He certainly meant an "SMT line", because phones assembled on a manual station in the USA (outside of shit quality) would cost well in excess of $2000.

[fooker]

> There are indeed a lot of people like me.

Are there a lot of people like you that are willing to do this as a minimum wage job? Because that's the real ask.

[iszomer]

They might, if their expectations are as simple as an on ramp to better or more stable things. It would also make sense for those who are using this method for career change.

I have a coworker who "couldn't hack it" as a paralegal and is now working in the line for server assembly. Or another coworker who came from a major daytrading firm to work quality control with me.

[camillomiller]

That’s not what they do. As Tim Cook said multiple times the engineers are needed as floor and line managers, to coordinate parts of the process, to set up new lines quickly etc… those are not the ones doing the actual soldering.

[thenthenthen]

Do what? There are literally thousands of shops here in SZ where ppl are manually hot air reworking phone pcbs 24/7. For maybe 150 dollar a month?

[seba_dos1]

I can hot air rework a component on a phone too.

I won't assemble an entire smartphone this way unless I need to kill a lot of time and don't have anything better to do.

[suzzer99]

How hard can it be? Just tell them where to put the solder.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

There's more to it https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.33R86KF