The shift from fixing to replacing parts over 5 years

I started doing bench work in 2019 at a shop in Columbus and back then I'd actually reflow solder joints on motherboards, swap capacitors, even patch broken traces with jumper wire. Fast forward to this year and I'm lucky if a customer lets me crack open their laptop before they ask for a new main board quote. The parts are cheaper now, sure, but it's also that boards are so packed and glued that my repair time often beats the replacement cost. I did a count last week and out of 22 jobs, only 3 involved component level work, the rest were just swap and go. What's pushing this more, is it the manufacturers designing stuff to be disposable or just that our labor rates make it pointless? Has anyone else seen their soldering iron gather dust like mine?

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thea7042mo ago

Agree with you on the labor rate thing, that's the real killer. I mean I had a 2018 Dell where the charging port was just a bad solder joint, took me twenty minutes to fix with a reflow station. Customer saw the quote for bench time and still asked if a new board was faster, even though the part was like 30 bucks and we'd have to transfer the CPU and RAM over anyway. That's the thing, people don't see the skill part anymore, they just see the hourly rate next to a $120 mainboard on ebay. And honestly, the glued up chassis and flex cables that break if you breathe on em wrong just make component work take twice as long as it used to. So yeah, it's both, but the disposable design makes the cheap parts the only logical choice in a shop setting.

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