[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.