[trollbridge]

Yeah. Even a smaller town will have a random repair shop where a guy will replace phone screens, solder in a replacement power supply, and he seemingly has some kind of connection that can get him all these parts from Shenzhen. A comparable sized town in America won't have anything comparable other than a Dollar General selling phone chargers.

[dannyw]

You can get basically any part from Shenzhen with an Alibaba account, if you know what you're looking for.

For reaching out to a seller/merchant, I found it helps significantly if you google translate into Chinese, and just communicate in Chinese.

[trollbridge]

Yeha, it's the "know what you're looking for" part that a random guy in a near-warzone in Ukraine will know.

[overfeed]

> know what you're looking for

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

[artisinal]

And the person at the repair shop typically has a Masters degree in electrical engineering or similar.

[shuwix]

I have a guy which can fix almost anything. But well, he has high paying job, and has 600k EUR apartment.

You can't expect him to waste weekend fixing something for pennies.

Unlike a guy living in shed, driving 20+ yo Daewoo Lanos.

[AngryData]

Well and also parts are far more available and way cheaper. Had to replace 2 capacitors and a thermistor in an power supply not long ago. Cheapest price I could find for those 3 parts? $40. The highest unit price of those components individually was like $1.25, but I didn't need 20+ of each and everywhere else had crazy shipping costs on top of 20x markup. And there was no place within 300 miles that sold anything like that if I didn't want to wait 2 weeks for it to arrive.

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.

[TeMPOraL]

> 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.

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.)

[pigpop]

I think it's a bit less about being extremely skillful and more about the number of people who go into hardware combined with the cost of living and renting office space.

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.

[philipallstar]

If I were on the hook for €600k and only had an apartment I'd be pretty jealous of my time too.

[knowaveragejoe]

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.

[Gigachad]

At least in Australia, anything outside common phone repairs goes in to the "not worth it" basket. I had a USB-C port snap of a microphone, PCB pads were still fine, just needs someone to use a hot air gun to attach a new port. Repair stores didn't want to touch it.

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.

[themaninthedark]

We say wages are high in the west, yet we are literally paying people to stand around in line for us.

https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/01/16/professional-line-s...

[Gigachad]

The skill gap between line stander and SMD soldering is fairly large

[themaninthedark]

That's part of what I was thinking about, we have people with little/ low skills that we pay to do things that make no sense.

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.

[thenthenthen]

You could do SMD while standing in line!

[psd1]

You know you've done it right when the entire untidy queue pops into an even straight line

[b112]

I picture some rig you wear with a small ledge on ypur stomach, and a battery pack on your back, to power the soldering iron. I've wrapped a thin wire around my soldering tip to work on tiny pads, so I envision this plus magnifying eyewear too.

Sadly in the US the bomb squad would soon show and shoot your ass, but maybe you'd get a settlement out of it.

[thefroh]

I had my lenovo laptop's last USB-C port bugger up. of course, lenovo themselves will repair this by replacing the mainboard (~1.5k+?).

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.

[fancyfredbot]

I don't entirely understand why they "didn't want to touch it"? Surely they were capable of soldering a new port. I'm sure they'd have had to charge a lot. There's unlikely to be much difference in cost between the repair and a replacement microphone.

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?

[Gigachad]

Tbh they didn’t even open it up. Just decided it was too hard and gave it back. I had to follow a YouTube tutorial to work out how to open it since stuff is designed to hide all visible entry points these days.

Had I handed it to them disassembled and asked them to just solder a port on they might have accepted.

[Someone]

> I don't entirely understand why they "didn't want to touch it"?

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.

[inigyou]

Liability, and hassle. They have a few repairs they do regularly. Anything else is a risk and they don't need the money that badly. And they can't be 90% confident they'll get it right, since they don't do it regularly.

[Gigachad]

They also can’t charge if they can’t fix it. And they don’t know the extent of the damage beforehand. So they could waste an hour of labor before finding its unfixable.

In that time they could have done 3 iPhone battery replacements.

[burner420042]

Replacing components like a phone screen, yeah - but not the kind of thing the OP is talking about. More like replacing a worn USB-C port on a random motherboard using a soldering iron, hot air station, and microscope, or tracking down an unknown failed component on a circuit board, or swapping a random surface-mount Motorola chip in the ECU of your early-2000s car. Sometimes there’s a whole market square where every shop specializes in one of these things.

And it's not that expensive.

[VBprogrammer]

After getting sucked into "I bought this to repair it" YouTube I started looking for things on eBay. I was amazed to find that things like PlayStations with declared faults which made them completely unusable were selling at 70-80% the price as things which were sold as working.

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.

[artisinal]

The price of repair is calculated into the asking price.

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.

[K0balt]

I don’t think that is true. Ubiquitous access to free or low cost education is what makes this possible, and I certainly don’t see those kinds of businesses in towns of 50-100k people in the USA. There are people that are capable of that kind of work, of course, but they are employed by x corp or do contract work, and they are not competing with the cost of replacement consumers devices, since their rates would have to be > 150 an hour to stay in business.