121–130 of 143 posts
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He answered in a comment. It was about 300 USD in parts but he's not sure because he'd spent a lot of money gearing up to try to populate a bare logic board pcb by hand before someone talked him out of it.
He said on reddit he spent about $1000 all up including the tools required.
Amazing how they use WeChat for everything and how someone's word has value in the negotiations. They hardly use paper, receipts.
All those people and all that parts infrastructure, just to repair and recycle one brand of phones. Phone repair training school with posters of iPhone boards on the wall. All those shops selling phone parts. All that specialized equipment for servicing them. I like the "bubble removing" machine, a heated vacuum chamber. It looks like mid 20th century automotive, when there were corners with four gas stations that ac…
I suspect it's due to the short effective lifetime due to obsolescence.
Ruggedised phones and cases are already available. The average person doesn't mind much, although there's strong nostalgia for the indestructible era of early Nokias.
The vertically integrated nature of the industry means you have to choose one of Apple or Android; and if you choose Apple, you're stuck with whatever products they choose to offer.
I've tried to fix the screen on an iPad and an iPhone. In both cases, I destroyed a ribbon cable connector and rendered the devices useless. I tried to follow the instructions, I tried to use proper tools and go as slowly as possible, and in both cases, the delicate surface mount connectors just turned into powder and flaked right off the board.
You must be doing something wrong. I have had my original iPhone 5 since release in 2013. Ive replaced essentailly every part in the phone but the mainboard. I just bought a parts phone on ebay for $20 and completely replaced the digitizer. Battery replacements are $5 and take two minutes. Ive even replaced the entire lightning port assembly for 7$ in parts and an hour of time. Its the most modular easily repaired ph…
On a side note, iPhones are really easy to get parts for. I had the digitiser fail on a cheap no-name Android tablet, and as far as I can tell you can't get replacement parts for it.
So IFixit iPhone repair scores are invalid if you live in Shenzhen.
Makes me wish you could buy a kit and assemble your own phone. We need someone like Arduino to come along for this kind of tech. Would be awesome to just pick up my old and faithful Hakko and solder some sensor to a phone.
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He seems to think a lot of the parts are refurbished from original iPhones, with a mix I imagine of pretty good copies. I've bought some non-OEM replacement parts for Android phones and the copies have been pretty phenomenal, so I'm not sure where the mix falls. I had to laugh at the hand-drawn logos on the kiosk of the guys who owned the 'Remove Bubble Machine'.
Hi, Scotty here - the guy that made the video. bspn pretty much nails it. I don't really know for certain, but I think a lot of the parts are used/refurbished from original iPhones, with a couple parts that are really good copies mixed in. Everything is pretty top notch quality as far as I can tell though. And the screen repair booth art is totally legit. As is their workbench organization scheme.
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I just have very bad luck when things get small. I was so proud of myself when I got all that broken iPad glass off cleanly. Then that happened and it was a really dark moment for me. Currently I'm dealing with an out of warranty Apple Watch where the screen just went and fell right off, and apparently you cannot buy the glue strips for it unless you buy the whole screen. Apple figured out how to stop people from get…
As a side note: this issue happened to some early Apple watches (basically the glue didn't cure properly, I think?). Since it's a sorta known issue, you might be able to get it fixed for free, even though it's out of warranty. Here's a tweet from John Gruber of popular Apple blog Daring Fireball, who had the same thing happen to his wife's watch: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/783016045481033729?lang=en