111–120 of 141 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average techie is a coward.
I've known about this trick earlier, but the people who do it caution that the chance of succeeding is like 50/50.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it impacts size, manufacturing (automation) and money considerations. I mean now you suddenly need a slot of golden plated pins, you suddenly need a module with said pins and a memory chip soldered. You're introducing so much steps and complexity (thus expense) there for net negative. I know that people like to argue "but I can't upgrade RAM". Yes. But as we see here not impossible. Your car also needs some e…
> Perhaps it impacts size, manufacturing (automation) and money considerations. I mean now you suddenly need a slot of golden plated pins, you suddenly need a module with said pins and a memory chip soldered. You're introducing so much steps and complexity (thus expense) there for net negative. How is this relevant when the same point applies to system RAM?
512 conductors that have to be exactly the same length. Make them longer you'll say- now you just lost your high memory clocks to propigation delay and parasitics.
Seeing the problem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
The skill gap between line stander and SMD soldering is fairly large
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can tell, it's mostly just cost of labour vs cost of buying a new device. Watching professional repair shop youtube channels is one way to get a feel for the economics of it - it's usually only worth their time if it's a quick fix on an expensive product or a complex data-recovery attempt where the customer is paying much more than the cost of the device itself, because they value the data on it.
What if we automated it? Obviously, fully bespoke diagnosis and repair can't be automated (that's what bespoke means), but surely we can have a flying-probe machine that you put a MacBook circuit board into and it runs down the common failure tree by detecting the circuit board model and testing voltages at different points?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN crowd is treating this as some sort of sorcery, you can do it at home with a $60 hot air station. The only thing approaching "secret sauce" is the BIOS modding, which varies in difficulty depending on the device. For many devices it's just a case of reconfiguring strap resistors.
I have watched more than a few videos where someone tries to upgrade soldered RAM at home, only ending up sending the laptop to the same repair shop they hoped to skip after a failed experiment. Unless you can put money on your words and provide some sort of guarantee, nobody is going to take that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he's right. Techies are cowards. Those poor but educated people in the slums of Shenzhen are reverse engineering Nvidia GPUs to find out how to add more RAM, so what the fuck are we doing to have less results?
> so what the fuck are we doing in our cushy lives? Racking in money printed out of thin air by banks using a sleight of hand then forcing people to give us things in exchange for said printed money under threat of being bombed, invaded, and sanctioned
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
In that time they could have done 3 iPhone battery replacements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've known about this trick earlier, but the people who do it caution that the chance of succeeding is like 50/50.
Sounds about right for success odds for a novice, definitely don't start out on an expensive card. Get some low-capacity DIMMs or obsolete GPUs to practice on.