alt Hacker NewsAt 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.
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I had my lenovo laptop's last USB-C port bugger up. of course, lenovo themselves will repair this by replacing the mainboard (~1.5k+?).
so I did a search for anyone doing microsolder repairs nearby, picked the closest, and found someone who diagnosed, quoted, and then replaced both ports, and a chip that had vaporised itself along the way, for a couple hundred AUD.
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?
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...