4 ms·

This seems to be a company in the UAE. I've noticed in general that the far (and middle) East have far more miscellaneous repair services companies than the Wes

This seems to be a company in the UAE. I've noticed in general that the far (and middle) East have far more miscellaneous repair services companies than the West, and also more information online about it (albeit not in English.)

trollbridge 2mo ago
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.
- artisinal 2mo ago
  And the person at the repair shop typically has a Masters degree in electrical engineering or similar.
- knowaveragejoe 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    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 2mo ago
      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-standing-becomes-growing-business-americans-seek-skip-waits/ https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/01/16/professional-line-s...
      - Gigachad 2mo ago
        The skill gap between line stander and SMD soldering is fairly large
        thenthenthen 2mo ago
        You could do SMD while standing in line!
        psd1 2mo ago
        You know you've done it right when the entire untidy queue pops into an even straight line
        b112 2mo ago
        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.
        themaninthedark 2mo ago
        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-sitting-business-nyc-diddy-trial-sample-sale/ 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.
  - burner420042 2mo ago
    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 2mo ago
      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 2mo ago
        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 2mo ago
    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.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- shuwix 2mo ago
  I have a guy which can fix almost anything. But well, he has high paying job, and has 600k EUR apartment. You can't expect him to waste weekend fixing something for pennies. Unlike a guy living in shed, driving 20+ yo Daewoo Lanos.
  - AngryData 2mo ago
    Well and also parts are far more available and way cheaper. Had to replace 2 capacitors and a thermistor in an power supply not long ago. Cheapest price I could find for those 3 parts? $40. The highest unit price of those components individually was like $1.25, but I didn't need 20+ of each and everywhere else had crazy shipping costs on top of 20x markup. And there was no place within 300 miles that sold anything like that if I didn't want to wait 2 weeks for it to arrive. A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away. The chat, diagnosing, and repair took me less than an hour overall so with cheap parts I could have charged someone $40 and made $35 an hour if I had cheap and available parts while saving them $250. But dealing with parts issues nearly triples my minimum price for a business operation because I either have to spend a bunch of time finding the best deal for parts and have this thing sit on my bench for two weeks+ as they ship, or get ripped off paying 80 dollars to get it within a week. And by time they are spending $120 on a repair, they are already nearly half the price of buying something brand new that can be shipped to their door in 2 days with a 2 year manufacturers warranty, so they wouldn't want to attempt to pay someone to repair it at all.
    - TeMPOraL 2mo ago
      > A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away. Or from a previous customer who had to replace a whole power supply module, and those parts happened to be perfectly fine on the otherwise broken subassembly they left behind for disposal. That's how repair efficiency enabled by scale looks like when you zoom in. They'll replace your broken screen in 5 minutes and for 10x less than the price of the replacement screen (!), as long as you let them take the damaged one, because someone will actually fix that damaged part and use it as replacement for the next customer, etc. There is enough volume they can decouple and time-shift actual repair and replacement. (And of course should they not have a freshly repaired part of a kind, there's probably a booth selling those very parts within 50 meters of where they sit, that's also a direct line to some factory in Shenzhen. You know, the kind of booth where they look at you funny if your answer to "how many pieces" has less than three zeros in it.)
- dannyw 2mo ago
  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.
  - trollbridge 2mo ago
    Yeha, it's the "know what you're looking for" part that a random guy in a near-warzone in Ukraine will know.
    - overfeed 2mo ago
      > know what you're looking for A modern cellphones have only about 10 replaceable assemblies[1] - repairers aren't typically replacing individual broken chips, an entire assembly/part. "[knowing] what you're looking for" is easy of you know what broke the device, or following basic troubleshooting steps. Getting into repairs these days is easy; YouTube, Alibaba, Forums/File-sharing sites, USB-C and Open Source firmware-flashing tools have conspired to lower the bar of entry. If you have an old phone in your device drawer with a damaged screen or unusable battery, you probably can fix it yourself, with the right tools and some patience. 1. Cover, chassis, screen, digitizer, mainboard, speaker, mic, daughter-boards, variously cables/ribbons
pjmlp 2mo ago
This used to be a common thing even in Portugal, until we started going down the throw away working electronics mindset, and yes we're to blame as well, consumers drive the market.
inigyou 2mo ago
We're all too busy running in circles trying to pay rent and not get sued, while they're doing productive stuff. It helps that most chip documentation is written in Chinese now. For obvious reasons.
Retr0id 2mo ago
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.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  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?
  - Retr0id 2mo ago
    They have devices pretty close to that, in China. Not fully automated diagnosis, but test jigs that hook up the things that need hooking up, and monitor the things that need monitoring. Search "iPhone test fixture" on aliexpress.

trollbridge 2mo ago

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.

artisinal 2mo ago
And the person at the repair shop typically has a Masters degree in electrical engineering or similar.
knowaveragejoe 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    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-standing-becomes-growing-business-americans-seek-skip-waits/ https://www.investigatetv.com/2026/01/16/professional-line-s...
    - Gigachad 2mo ago
      The skill gap between line stander and SMD soldering is fairly large
      - thenthenthen 2mo ago
        You could do SMD while standing in line!
        psd1 2mo ago
        You know you've done it right when the entire untidy queue pops into an even straight line
        b112 2mo ago
        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.
      - themaninthedark 2mo ago
        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-sitting-business-nyc-diddy-trial-sample-sale/ 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.
- burner420042 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    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 2mo ago
      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 2mo ago
  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.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
shuwix 2mo ago
I have a guy which can fix almost anything. But well, he has high paying job, and has 600k EUR apartment. You can't expect him to waste weekend fixing something for pennies. Unlike a guy living in shed, driving 20+ yo Daewoo Lanos.
- AngryData 2mo ago
  Well and also parts are far more available and way cheaper. Had to replace 2 capacitors and a thermistor in an power supply not long ago. Cheapest price I could find for those 3 parts? $40. The highest unit price of those components individually was like $1.25, but I didn't need 20+ of each and everywhere else had crazy shipping costs on top of 20x markup. And there was no place within 300 miles that sold anything like that if I didn't want to wait 2 weeks for it to arrive. A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away. The chat, diagnosing, and repair took me less than an hour overall so with cheap parts I could have charged someone $40 and made $35 an hour if I had cheap and available parts while saving them $250. But dealing with parts issues nearly triples my minimum price for a business operation because I either have to spend a bunch of time finding the best deal for parts and have this thing sit on my bench for two weeks+ as they ship, or get ripped off paying 80 dollars to get it within a week. And by time they are spending $120 on a repair, they are already nearly half the price of buying something brand new that can be shipped to their door in 2 days with a 2 year manufacturers warranty, so they wouldn't want to attempt to pay someone to repair it at all.
  - TeMPOraL 2mo ago
    > A chinese guy could get those parts for way less, have them shipped way faster, or probably just buy them from a physical store not that far away. Or from a previous customer who had to replace a whole power supply module, and those parts happened to be perfectly fine on the otherwise broken subassembly they left behind for disposal. That's how repair efficiency enabled by scale looks like when you zoom in. They'll replace your broken screen in 5 minutes and for 10x less than the price of the replacement screen (!), as long as you let them take the damaged one, because someone will actually fix that damaged part and use it as replacement for the next customer, etc. There is enough volume they can decouple and time-shift actual repair and replacement. (And of course should they not have a freshly repaired part of a kind, there's probably a booth selling those very parts within 50 meters of where they sit, that's also a direct line to some factory in Shenzhen. You know, the kind of booth where they look at you funny if your answer to "how many pieces" has less than three zeros in it.)
dannyw 2mo ago
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.
- trollbridge 2mo ago
  Yeha, it's the "know what you're looking for" part that a random guy in a near-warzone in Ukraine will know.
  - overfeed 2mo ago
    > know what you're looking for A modern cellphones have only about 10 replaceable assemblies[1] - repairers aren't typically replacing individual broken chips, an entire assembly/part. "[knowing] what you're looking for" is easy of you know what broke the device, or following basic troubleshooting steps. Getting into repairs these days is easy; YouTube, Alibaba, Forums/File-sharing sites, USB-C and Open Source firmware-flashing tools have conspired to lower the bar of entry. If you have an old phone in your device drawer with a damaged screen or unusable battery, you probably can fix it yourself, with the right tools and some patience. 1. Cover, chassis, screen, digitizer, mainboard, speaker, mic, daughter-boards, variously cables/ribbons

pjmlp 2mo ago

This used to be a common thing even in Portugal, until we started going down the throw away working electronics mindset, and yes we're to blame as well, consumers drive the market.

inigyou 2mo ago

We're all too busy running in circles trying to pay rent and not get sued, while they're doing productive stuff. It helps that most chip documentation is written in Chinese now. For obvious reasons.

Retr0id 2mo ago

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.

inigyou 2mo ago
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?
- Retr0id 2mo ago
  They have devices pretty close to that, in China. Not fully automated diagnosis, but test jigs that hook up the things that need hooking up, and monitor the things that need monitoring. Search "iPhone test fixture" on aliexpress.