3 ms·

It scales fine. Diagnosing and repairing these issues is not as hard as you think, and there aren't that many places that will pay, say, 40$/h for such a skill.

It scales fine. Diagnosing and repairing these issues is not as hard as you think, and there aren't that many places that will pay, say, 40$/h for such a skill. It's also something you can train people on. The biggest problem is that you can't get the parts. That's because if you have a schematic, you can build a diagnosis flowchart from it, so all you need is to know how to use a multimeter and you can follow the flowchart. If you can't figure it out from there, you cut your losses. Then the skill remaining is to be able to hand-solder SMD components - it's not an easy skill, but there are plenty of jobs that pay worse for harder skills and not many places that will pay you well for it (if you know one, I'm all ears). You don't need to be particularly quick either. Such a repair for a really good technician might only take 20 minutes, an average one maybe 1.5 hours. At 50$/h, with a 50% success rate, you still make 150$ of expected marginal profit if you charge 300$. And of course many repairs are even easier. However most places pay around 25$/h and just ask that you have a high school diploma and some soldering experience. But the fact that you just can't buy parts means that you need to buy donor boards, and that doesn't scale well.

wtallis 3y ago
> You don't need to be particularly quick either. Such a repair for a really good technician might only take 20 minutes, an average one maybe 1.5 hours. Total bullshit. It takes more than 20 minutes just to disassemble and reassemble a laptop to get the motherboard out without damaging anything. Diagnosing the failed component can be quicker in some cases (eg. scorch marks), but checking the extent of collateral damage isn't that quick. A more realistic estimate would be about two or three repairs per day, unless you want to complicate things by stipulating that all the less skilled parts of the process (disassembly, fetching replacement parts reassembly, verifying repair worked) are to be done by a less skilled technician and only the actual board inspection, probing, and rework are done by the skilled technician. And then you have to consider that such repairs will never have a perfect success rate, so you need to be able to regularly eat the cost of wasted time on failed repairs while still keeping the cost of labor and maintaining an extensive parts inventory cheaper than the cost of a new motherboard.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  It really doesn't take more than 20 minutes to get access to the motherboard of a MacBook. Are you under the notion that you need to fully strip down the computer before being able to diagnose it? You don't. You just pop the back cover, replace the battery with a bench power supply, and start testings. You can do most tests without removing the board from the chassis. You might eventually need to get access to the other side of the board, but again it doesn't take 20 minutes to do that. Here's a video where they remove and put back a MacBook Air motherboard in 13 minutes, on camera (https://youtu.be/Sk8kj_y32mU?si=4fUoXux_zLIGg-9B https://youtu.be/Sk8kj_y32mU?si=4fUoXux_zLIGg-9B). I already took into account a pessimistic 50% repair success rate at a salary double what most shops pay.
  - dpkonofa 3y ago
    So then the parent is right. If disassembling it took 13 minutes, then they’d have 7 minutes left to reassemble and that wouldn’t involve any actual repair.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      It took 13 minutes to both disassemble and reassemble. So then you have another 20 minutes to diagnose. If you can repair 50% of boards that make it far enough that you need to dissassemble for diagnosis and then you take an additional 30 minutes to do the repair with 50% success rate, you're spending 3.6 hours per repair, which is perfectly fine if you're charging 300$. These are pessimistic assumptions too - you often don't need to dissassemble the board to diagnose it, the person disassembling the board doesn't need to be paid as much as the person doing the repair, and you'll probably have a better than 50% repair success rate.
      - wtallis 3y ago
        > It took 13 minutes to both disassemble and reassemble Try linking to a video that doesn't fast forward the boring bits before doubling down on that 13 minute claim.

wtallis 3y ago

> You don't need to be particularly quick either. Such a repair for a really good technician might only take 20 minutes, an average one maybe 1.5 hours. Total bullshit. It takes more than 20 minutes just to disassemble and reassemble a laptop to get the motherboard out without damaging anything. Diagnosing the failed component can be quicker in some cases (eg. scorch marks), but checking the extent of collateral damage isn't that quick. A more realistic estimate would be about two or three repairs per day, unless you want to complicate things by stipulating that all the less skilled parts of the process (disassembly, fetching replacement parts reassembly, verifying repair worked) are to be done by a less skilled technician and only the actual board inspection, probing, and rework are done by the skilled technician. And then you have to consider that such repairs will never have a perfect success rate, so you need to be able to regularly eat the cost of wasted time on failed repairs while still keeping the cost of labor and maintaining an extensive parts inventory cheaper than the cost of a new motherboard.

sudosysgen 3y ago
It really doesn't take more than 20 minutes to get access to the motherboard of a MacBook. Are you under the notion that you need to fully strip down the computer before being able to diagnose it? You don't. You just pop the back cover, replace the battery with a bench power supply, and start testings. You can do most tests without removing the board from the chassis. You might eventually need to get access to the other side of the board, but again it doesn't take 20 minutes to do that. Here's a video where they remove and put back a MacBook Air motherboard in 13 minutes, on camera (https://youtu.be/Sk8kj_y32mU?si=4fUoXux_zLIGg-9B https://youtu.be/Sk8kj_y32mU?si=4fUoXux_zLIGg-9B). I already took into account a pessimistic 50% repair success rate at a salary double what most shops pay.
- dpkonofa 3y ago
  So then the parent is right. If disassembling it took 13 minutes, then they’d have 7 minutes left to reassemble and that wouldn’t involve any actual repair.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    It took 13 minutes to both disassemble and reassemble. So then you have another 20 minutes to diagnose. If you can repair 50% of boards that make it far enough that you need to dissassemble for diagnosis and then you take an additional 30 minutes to do the repair with 50% success rate, you're spending 3.6 hours per repair, which is perfectly fine if you're charging 300$. These are pessimistic assumptions too - you often don't need to dissassemble the board to diagnose it, the person disassembling the board doesn't need to be paid as much as the person doing the repair, and you'll probably have a better than 50% repair success rate.
    - wtallis 3y ago
      > It took 13 minutes to both disassemble and reassemble Try linking to a video that doesn't fast forward the boring bits before doubling down on that 13 minute claim.