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Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

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Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#51

Samsung has been providing iFixit with genuine parts since at least the S20. Although this is a good first step it came with a huge major caveat: Screen+battery are only provided as a single assembly. You can't buy them separately. These are the two most common repairs on a smartphone and to get a simple battery you need to buy the expensive screen. I am hopeful Samsung redeems themselves this year especially with th…

That's really odd. I worked in samsung parts for a few years. While screen/frame assemblies were very common, the battery was always separate. Batteries generally got stored separately, and shipping requirements also provide some onus to keep them apart.

Particularly after seeing the pull adhesive strips in Pixel/iPhone I thought that would have become the norm.

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#52

Samsung has been providing iFixit with genuine parts since at least the S20. Although this is a good first step it came with a huge major caveat: Screen+battery are only provided as a single assembly. You can't buy them separately. These are the two most common repairs on a smartphone and to get a simple battery you need to buy the expensive screen. I am hopeful Samsung redeems themselves this year especially with th…

You can definitely buy the battery only, at least for the S21 Ultra, as I just went through that. https://www.ifixit.com/products/galaxy-s21-ultra-replacement...

[deleted]

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely buy the battery only, at least for the S21 Ultra, as I just went through that. https://www.ifixit.com/products/galaxy-s21-ultra-replacement...

That's an aftermarket part.

Yeah I would definitely not use that. Aftermarket parts can be fine but with batteries I don't take risks.

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Samsung should get the memory card slot back. They still have models with SD card slots, but they're never coming back to flagships because: 1. so they can milk you on cloud storage or on the expensive variants with more storage 2. access speed difference of UFS 4.0 vs fast SD cards is huge and unacceptable on a flagship that's supposed to compete with iPhones on speed 3. biggest and most important reason I learned…

1) Samsung actually stopped their cloud drive service. They have a dumb deal with Microsoft now but they're not really upselling you there anymore. The expensive higher-storage variants yes though. 2) Be aware by the way that on the Samsung S23 and S24 base models you are not even getting UFS 4.0! The 128GB model comes with UFS 3.1 only. All the 256GB models and up are 4.0. 3) Nah.. If they cared about performance an…

Point 1 being true (upselling for more money), doesn't negate points 2 (potential cloud partners deals) and 3 (SD cards shitify the UX) also being true.

Regarding Exynos, Devil's advocate take: Most customers won't be able to tell the difference between Exynos or not in real world tasks, but they will definitely tell the difference between reading off SD and UFS.

They don't put Exynos in the US because Qualcom owns that modem market there as even Apple still uses them. Maybe if the EU had any alrge domestic competitors left in these spaces(phone modems and mobile phones), the situation would be different, but since we don't, we're at the mercy of US and Asian giants for selling us their consumer hardware.

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm so freaking confused. I already explained my thought process as best I can. I don't know what more to do. >The person you replied to said this exact same thing They didn't say the same thing, to my understanding. Maybe language barrier and cultural differences mean there's a confusion here.

Unclad5968 said what you said. You claim Samsung keeps sd cards off phones because they are motivated to by partners. Unclad said "it seems excessive to think Samsung is doing keeping sd cards off phones because of partners". You and they disagree, but he stated your position accurately I believe.

No, I think I was right to disagree. He said Samsung doesn't put larger storage to sell Microsoft cloud storage.

I said that's false because Samsung doesn't put larger storage for mainly other reasons, but if they did put larger storage, then it would be a conflict of interest with their cloud storage partners, so they have an extra incentive to stick to this, but it's not the main one like (I understand) he claimed.

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're sarcastic or not, but SD cards have been absent from flagship Androids for about 10 years now. Wait till you find out the batteries are not swappable anymore.

Galaxy S10+ came out in 2019. I believe this was the last flagship to have a microSD card slot.

Interesting. I had a OnePlus 3 since early 2016 and that already dropped the SD card slot for UFS storage way back then so I assumed all flagships did the same.

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#57

I am currently looking for a new reliable OLED TV. Knowing they added the S90C to their repair program is very reassuring.

I’d definitely recommend LG TVs over Samsung, especially in the mid / high end range. The OS is so much better to use and you don’t get served up ads if you don’t want them.

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#58

I'm a little disappointed. My S22+ charging port is broken and the part on ifixit is 60$. IIRC the Samsung repair shop quoted me the fix to be 80$. Doesn't really seem like I'm saving enough to justify my labour and potential to break it due to lack of expertise. I highly doubt that component is actually worth 60$

Of course, the pricing is meant to disincentivise you from doing it. Apple is doing the exact same ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwgpTDluufY ). They don't want to enable DIY repair but they do this because they have to in some areas.

I assume this is also the reason they won't just sell you a battery without a screen.

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#59
post #46

This is cool, they even have some parts like the buttons and glass in different colours. So you could even use it to pimp your phone (I wouldn't break the waterproofing just for that but if you need to get in there anyway...) One thing that's annoying though is that with the S23 you need to buy a new screen when you want to change the battery. The battery is only available as a screen+battery kit. Weird. I mean, when…

Maybe it is because to many people break the screen when they try to replace the battery.

Could be but they can still go and buy one separately when they need it then.

Re: Samsung expands DIY repair program, adds Galaxy S23 and Fold 5 in US

#60
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The degradation increases the amount of negative charge in the cell over time due to trapped electrons in the oxide and negates some of the control gate voltage, this over time also makes erasing the cell slower, so to maintain the performance and reliability of the NAND chip, the cell must be retired from use. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory IIRC from when I worked making microcontrollers, there is a…

Flash memory does not erase during user actions. TRIM is done async

Flash memory is always erased during user-initiated writes in instances where trim is not used, or when there are not enough known-erased blocks to hold the write -- for whatever reasons these conditions may exist.

At a low level, a block of flash can't be written without being first erased. It might have been erased previously (which is ideal), but it might also might need to be erased immediately (which is much slower) in order for to perform a write operation.

And a trim command doesn't guarantee erasure of a low-level flash block -- it's up to the controller to sort out that out on its own.

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