There's a cultural quirk buried in the article, when the technician uses his or her "very long thumbnail (in lieu of a spudger/guitar pick)."
Some Chinese men grow one fingernail quite long as a sign that they do not toil in the fields (else the nail would be broken)[1]. It has been for some time a symbol of high status. Yet here we see a long fingernail employed specifically to aid manual labor.
I now wonder if there are budget repair guys walking around Shenzhen appearing to show off their socioeconomic status but actually just hoping their nails don't break because it would make splitting open broken phones less convenient.
Contrast this with my recent experience at the 14th Street and Fifth Avenue Apple Stores in New York.
Two weeks ago my Mac stopped booting. Made an appointment at the 14th Street Apple Store. Arrived 15 minutes early. Discovered there was a line to check in. That put you into a second line, the line to be seen by a "Genius". Forty-five minutes after my appointment time, I'm seen by someone with no intimate knowledge of my device. Laptop is checked in overnight.
Two days later, I receive my "fixed" Mac. SSD replaced, problem still there. Take it to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store at 4AM. This time I'm seen within 30 minutes of my appointment. "Genius" asks me to call phone support. Phone support insists Genius can solve the problem, asks to speak with Genius–nobody at store can find him. Thirty minutes later, phone support tells Genius what to do. Genius disappears into a back room, emerges 20 minutes later with the right tool. No clear answer as to what went wrong provided.
I am willing to pay for fast, smart solutions. Sometimes the brainpower is not available, and I accept that. Curious that I feel that brainpower would have been more amply available in the streets of Shenzhen than New York.
> Curious that I feel that brainpower would have been more amply available in the streets of Shenzhen than New York
...although perhaps not at 4AM, which is when you went? Not to play down the fact you had a pretty rough time of it, but the fact you could find someone to fix is at 4AM is to me an achievement in and of itself.
Actually I have a guy here in Shenzhen, also at Hua Qiang Bei who does board level repairs (with guarantee)on Macs for a fraction of what it costs to have the local Apple place swap out the whole thing. Shenzhen really is a Maker paradise.
Not curious at all. In Shenzhen and many parts of east Asia many young guys are really find of computers and hardware, and they are fighting hard for their daily bowl of rice.
Shenzhen, and particularly the Huaqiangbei area, is a great place to be if you're into electronics in general. Components are cheap and plentiful, and so are component-level repair shops. "Fixed while you wait (and watch)" is the norm, and some of the more popular shops have lineups of people waiting with their tablets/laptops/desktops/etc. in need of repair. A friend had his laptop's chipset reballed there (the nVidia one that was famous for failing early.) Very different experience than in the West.
I've been to Shenzhen (and specifically, the mobile phone markets) a few times.
Two impressions stuck with me...
First, I don't trust anything I buy anymore. If you buy a mobile phone on ebay, or if you buy one on amazon and it isn't fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, I don't think you can have any assurance that it is truly a brand new, factory produced device. I saw stall after stall after stall of women with long spools of holographic tape and "genuine nokia" stickers by the thousands who were brazenly re-wrapping and resealing both batteries and "new" devices. Bunnie speaks of the value of his spare parts, but the box and the manual would probably have been of equal value.
Second, I was surprised by the near total absence of anything truly interesting ... I spent 2.5 days looking for any tools or devices related to osmocom/openBTS/openBSC ... sim cloning, sim tracing, IMSI catching ... development kits or test hardware... and I saw not even a trace of this. I was also keeping my eyes open for any kind of console modding / console hacking and didn't see any of this either. I'm sure you could get your xbox chipped there, but beyond that ...
I'll be back soon ... I'd love to be proven wrong that there's nothing bleeding edge being hacked together around the phone-marts...
Sounds like he got scammed. Reballing only is a temporary few months at the most fix. Its not the pcb-bga contact that fails, its the silicon-bga package that has the problem. Reballing heats up whole chip and by accident reseals broken solder joints directly under the silicon. Those joints will crack again because NVIDIA used bad glue that gets plastic under heat stress.
The only way to fix bad Nvidia GPU is to replace it with a brand new one from the fixed batch with new glue formula.
I wish I had more adventures like this one, but I've found one of the things that holds me back is the language barrier. I don't speak any of Mandarin, Korean, or Japanese (I wouldn't be surprised if bunnie does, given how brilliant he is), and I worry that not being able to communicate effectively rules out serendipitous moments like these.
For others here, did you learn Chinese (or Spanish, or Arabic, or Russian) to assist you in your travels? I've always found learning computer languages easy, but human languages frustratingly difficult for me (different muscles, I know).
Just go. I just went to Shenzen last month. I don't speak a word of Chinese. It really helps that you can go to Hong Kong (where you can get by with English) first and cross the border by train/car. If you change your mind, it's easy to come back.
Crossed the border, got a SIM card with a data plan. Browsed wikitravel, showed taxi driver the characters for where I wanted to go. Then just take another taxi ride to a hotel from google maps, reception spoke English. Rest of the trip went similarly. Had no problems.
I had a similar experience as the author I broke my cell phone in Chongqing, China. If you have a chance to go to China, I highly recommend it. The society is just so different there, and it's incredible in so many ways.
You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do.
I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there.
I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different.
In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.
Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.
I just spent a six-month internship in Japan without speaking the language. People there are very polite and helpful. They will take as much time as necessary to understand what you want to say.
And while you're there you'll automatically learn some of the greetings and words in the local language. Try to apply what you've learned and they'll be delighted to see you try to speak the language.
If you ever get the chance to see the world, don't let something like a language barrier hold you back. Just go.
I knew about a few hours worth of Korean before I spent the next 2 years there. Granted, a few hours of Korean can be very useful since there's a limited alphabet, like English, and just knowing how to read the words is hugely helpful, even if you don't know what they mean. This is because a lot of time they're just English loan words in disguise in Korean characters.
I did start Korean classes a few days into my trip (first time was study abroad) which set the stage for later. But I didn't know it going in, no.
I wouldn't let that set you back. All you need is a sense of adventure mixed with equal amounts of common sense and money. I got round SK/Japan with a few basic words that I made sure to learn to at least try to be polite.
Well bunnie is Singaporean, and most if not all Singaporeans can speak Mandarin (not a linguist but Chinese is more of the language, and Mandarin the dialect, albeit the "official" dialect for the language).
One interesting aspect of replacement is the difference between a good rework job and a bad rework job is typically environmental sealing. Does the case still snap perfectly tightly, with sealant/gaskets, if any, around the borders etc?
This is useful advice not just for people doing it themselves, but to evaluate a shops ability to do rework. If its a busy shop catch a guy leaving with a replacement and ask to see some completed work.
There is an analogy with programming where a mere "it compiled" is not exactly the pinnacle of all possible compliments.
Same deal here in Bolivia, you break something chances are someone somewhere in Los Cachis can fix it for you inexpensively.
For example my Kindle 1st gen charging port was no longer snapping the connector cable correctly - I took it in and for 20Bs ($3) they fixed a soldered part that had come loose with the ins-and-outs of the charging cable.
I did this myself for my Nokia Lumia 920. Same fault - the glass cracked but the digitizer and display were fine. Hair dryer, tweezers and a ton of patience. It took me four hours though, but it was a complete success.
If you're planning on doing this yourself, don't be tempted to buy an unbranded replacement - they may be fakes or poor quality reproductions (not gorilla glass, digitizer inaccurate, etc.) - My phone was a developer device but I replaced the screen with an AT&T branded one. The branded screens are usually genuine.
Simply obtaining branded hardware can be difficult -- I recently had to replace the full assembly on my Nexus 4, and in the process had 2 orders out of Shenzhen seized by customs, while a 3rd out of HK successfully shipped. This was all due to an LG logo that was only visible on the back of the part.
This post hints at one of the great advantages of being close to suppliers. When you're that close to the supply source, you gain all sorts of advantages like:
a) You can typically find the person actually building the damn thing, and ask about it.
b) You can probably get your hands on a large set of cheap, defective parts to play around with.
c) You can get your hands on the actual parts really cheap.
b and c together vastly reduces the cost of experimentation, and more importantly, reduces the cost of screwing up.
This is some of what you lose when you become just the end node of the supply chain. This is the type of 'magic' that some people speak about when they talk about when 'America (or insert your choice of western democratic country) built things'.
The hairdryer as heat-gun method was first shown to me by an incredibly gifted Electrical Engineer (from China) who used this method to fix dry joints on PCBs (including consumer mainboards).
It was astounding the first time I saw a dead MB revived with nothing more than a bathroom accessory!
That's pretty nice, but in the US at least, the digitizer alone is almost always never replaced because it is a fairly dangerous maneuver. [1]
Also, if you have the tools (and I would recommend buying a small electronics tool set to everyone, because it's a lot cheaper and funner to fix stuff yourself than to pay someone to fix it), then you can buy a complete LCD + digitizer for $36 on Amazon. [2]
It's hard to understand Shenzhen if you've not been there. I just returned from the Dangerous Prototypes Hackercamp in Shenzhen, and quite frankly, I don't think there is anyway you can fully comprehend what they can do there if you haven't seen it with your own eyes. Such things as replacing the glass are completely routine and done with incredible speed and precision. They have tools and techniques there not found anywhere else.
I ran into Ian and Jin from Dangerous Prototypes at the SF Bay MakerFaire last weekend where they were demonstrating the BGA reballing techniques we learned at the Land Mobile Repair School in Shenzhen. Ian told me that earlier in the Faire, a couple of Intel engineers stopped by to tell him that what he was doing was wrong, incorrect and impossible (or some combination thereof). He ran them through the process and left them agog, not only that the process developed by the Chinese (about $50USD in tools and supplies) was comparable to a $XX,000 reballing machine, but that they'd never seen or heard of these techniques before. They were throwing away prototypes worth thousands of dollars instead of fixing the problem because they didn't have proper reballing machines/jigs.
It is well worth the trip to Shenzhen if only to see them disassemble a phone completely and refurb it faster than imaginable. Ian hopes to make HCS a regular event and I highly recommend it!
Not all phones are so stuck-together as the iPhone, though. I cracked the glass my Lumia 920 and I'm considering just replacing the digitizer. The replacement is $15 on Amazon compared to $45 for the screen.
When I repair phones, I always replace the digitizer and the LCD, firstly because it is too difficult to separate them, but secondly because buying the LCD+Digitizer as one unit isn't that much more expensive than buying the digitizer on its own.
I didn't have the same luck with a nexus 7 couple of months ago. It fell from a small night table and the screen shattered (the digitizer still works). I did the same process as the post explained and I got a replacement in Amazon ($60 and $6 for the tape), but for some reason it didn't work. The broken screen used to work, but now I only hear noise when I turn it on, but no image. I think I made a mistake when I was removing the graphic ribbon, who knows. Now I feel like I don't want to put more money and time into it. It's great a company like that recycle everything, just separating the digitizer takes a lot of work.
> I had originally assumed that the glass on the digitizer is inseparable from the OLED, but apparently those clever folks in Hua Qiang Bei have figured out an efficient method...
There is a large amount of skill involved. I saw a designer take apart a smartphone to use the digitizer in a "looks like works like" prototype. Getting the glue off and otherwise dissembling a smartphone screen without breaking anything is not easy! It's not meant to be repairable. And this guy is a wizard at building prototypes.
I've got the iFixit repair kit. So far I've used it to repair a kindle hdx, a samsung android device, and an iphone 5c. Basically I just wait until a friend breaks their device and fix it for free. I got a free kindle fire HD out of the deal anyway. I don't ask for money since it's usually friends. I've also used it to replace the battery in my lenovo p500 which does not have a removable battery i.e. you must crack it open.
> This is the power of recycling and repair — instead of paying $120 for a screen and throwing away what is largely a functional piece of electronics, I just had to pay for the cost of just replacing the broken glass itself.
Some level of replace-ability should be enforced by law. There should be universal interchangeable types of batteries. Board self-test should be available and so on.
That's not how engineering works. There are good designs that can't be achieved while making things replaceable. For example, the reason screen glass often isn't replaceable is because it's optically bonded to the underlying LCD, which improves sharpness, reduces glare, and reduces parallax when using a pen. The reason batteries usually can't be replaced is that it saves space and weight to use naked Li-Poly battery packs molded to the available space. Making say a back case removal reduces structural rigidity and reduces space available for a battery. That's engineering--making trade-offs between features people may not care about in favor of features they care more about.
I presume you would advocate this new law in hopes that it would drive up the feasibility of repairs, therefore lowering costs to consumers. But it won't do that: it will increase costs (and reduce revenues) to manufacturers who will happily pass those costs on to consumers, and the only people who will come out ahead will be the lawyers.
Also, you do not want a phone made by the government.
This amounts to a legal ban on innovation that doesn't fit the current template. It also increases costs.
(The EU charger standard is a good example: it works very well at eliminating the stupid proliferation of chargers which end up in landfill or WEEE, but not everyone is happy with micro-USB and arguably it's now the weak point in many phones which causes them to break early)
The three times I've broken phone screens it's always the OLED/LCD display that popped and the digitizer just sat there and grinned at me having protected sod all. I've replaced them all myself and it's been pretty easy on all devices and very cheap. The OLED/LCD displays all came from ebay.
I was curious about the diagnostic code mentioned * # 0 * #
I tried it and the phone did seem to go into some diagnostic mode and showed "please wait" for about 5 seconds, then just stopped with "Unknown Error" Sad.
[+] [-] jzwinck|12 years ago|reply
Some Chinese men grow one fingernail quite long as a sign that they do not toil in the fields (else the nail would be broken)[1]. It has been for some time a symbol of high status. Yet here we see a long fingernail employed specifically to aid manual labor.
I now wonder if there are budget repair guys walking around Shenzhen appearing to show off their socioeconomic status but actually just hoping their nails don't break because it would make splitting open broken phones less convenient.
[1] http://www.vagabondjourney.com/why-chinese-men-grow-long-fin...
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|12 years ago|reply
Two weeks ago my Mac stopped booting. Made an appointment at the 14th Street Apple Store. Arrived 15 minutes early. Discovered there was a line to check in. That put you into a second line, the line to be seen by a "Genius". Forty-five minutes after my appointment time, I'm seen by someone with no intimate knowledge of my device. Laptop is checked in overnight.
Two days later, I receive my "fixed" Mac. SSD replaced, problem still there. Take it to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store at 4AM. This time I'm seen within 30 minutes of my appointment. "Genius" asks me to call phone support. Phone support insists Genius can solve the problem, asks to speak with Genius–nobody at store can find him. Thirty minutes later, phone support tells Genius what to do. Genius disappears into a back room, emerges 20 minutes later with the right tool. No clear answer as to what went wrong provided.
I am willing to pay for fast, smart solutions. Sometimes the brainpower is not available, and I accept that. Curious that I feel that brainpower would have been more amply available in the streets of Shenzhen than New York.
[+] [-] objclxt|12 years ago|reply
...although perhaps not at 4AM, which is when you went? Not to play down the fact you had a pretty rough time of it, but the fact you could find someone to fix is at 4AM is to me an achievement in and of itself.
[+] [-] Wogef|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisauserid|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|12 years ago|reply
Bunnie has been there before:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=283
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=147
[+] [-] rsync|12 years ago|reply
Two impressions stuck with me...
First, I don't trust anything I buy anymore. If you buy a mobile phone on ebay, or if you buy one on amazon and it isn't fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, I don't think you can have any assurance that it is truly a brand new, factory produced device. I saw stall after stall after stall of women with long spools of holographic tape and "genuine nokia" stickers by the thousands who were brazenly re-wrapping and resealing both batteries and "new" devices. Bunnie speaks of the value of his spare parts, but the box and the manual would probably have been of equal value.
Second, I was surprised by the near total absence of anything truly interesting ... I spent 2.5 days looking for any tools or devices related to osmocom/openBTS/openBSC ... sim cloning, sim tracing, IMSI catching ... development kits or test hardware... and I saw not even a trace of this. I was also keeping my eyes open for any kind of console modding / console hacking and didn't see any of this either. I'm sure you could get your xbox chipped there, but beyond that ...
I'll be back soon ... I'd love to be proven wrong that there's nothing bleeding edge being hacked together around the phone-marts...
[+] [-] rasz_pl|12 years ago|reply
Sounds like he got scammed. Reballing only is a temporary few months at the most fix. Its not the pcb-bga contact that fails, its the silicon-bga package that has the problem. Reballing heats up whole chip and by accident reseals broken solder joints directly under the silicon. Those joints will crack again because NVIDIA used bad glue that gets plastic under heat stress.
The only way to fix bad Nvidia GPU is to replace it with a brand new one from the fixed batch with new glue formula.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjmBv6nvUOM
[+] [-] dewitt|12 years ago|reply
For others here, did you learn Chinese (or Spanish, or Arabic, or Russian) to assist you in your travels? I've always found learning computer languages easy, but human languages frustratingly difficult for me (different muscles, I know).
[+] [-] bemmu|12 years ago|reply
Crossed the border, got a SIM card with a data plan. Browsed wikitravel, showed taxi driver the characters for where I wanted to go. Then just take another taxi ride to a hotel from google maps, reception spoke English. Rest of the trip went similarly. Had no problems.
[+] [-] icebraining|12 years ago|reply
He is brilliant, but having Chinese parents probably helped :)
http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/history.html
[+] [-] Frazzydee|12 years ago|reply
You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do.
I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there.
I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different.
In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.
Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|12 years ago|reply
Although it was originally developed for Japanese, the basic concepts are not language-specific.
[+] [-] ximeng|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] armada651|12 years ago|reply
And while you're there you'll automatically learn some of the greetings and words in the local language. Try to apply what you've learned and they'll be delighted to see you try to speak the language.
If you ever get the chance to see the world, don't let something like a language barrier hold you back. Just go.
[+] [-] ddoolin|12 years ago|reply
I did start Korean classes a few days into my trip (first time was study abroad) which set the stage for later. But I didn't know it going in, no.
[+] [-] petemc_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jon2512chua|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cerberusss|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
This is useful advice not just for people doing it themselves, but to evaluate a shops ability to do rework. If its a busy shop catch a guy leaving with a replacement and ask to see some completed work.
There is an analogy with programming where a mere "it compiled" is not exactly the pinnacle of all possible compliments.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|12 years ago|reply
For example my Kindle 1st gen charging port was no longer snapping the connector cable correctly - I took it in and for 20Bs ($3) they fixed a soldered part that had come loose with the ins-and-outs of the charging cable.
[+] [-] x0n|12 years ago|reply
If you're planning on doing this yourself, don't be tempted to buy an unbranded replacement - they may be fakes or poor quality reproductions (not gorilla glass, digitizer inaccurate, etc.) - My phone was a developer device but I replaced the screen with an AT&T branded one. The branded screens are usually genuine.
[+] [-] subway|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icegreentea|12 years ago|reply
a) You can typically find the person actually building the damn thing, and ask about it.
b) You can probably get your hands on a large set of cheap, defective parts to play around with.
c) You can get your hands on the actual parts really cheap.
b and c together vastly reduces the cost of experimentation, and more importantly, reduces the cost of screwing up.
This is some of what you lose when you become just the end node of the supply chain. This is the type of 'magic' that some people speak about when they talk about when 'America (or insert your choice of western democratic country) built things'.
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Intermernet|12 years ago|reply
It was astounding the first time I saw a dead MB revived with nothing more than a bathroom accessory!
[+] [-] linker3000|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz_pl|12 years ago|reply
Hair dryer in Bunnies case was used to heat up the GLUE between glass and screen.
[+] [-] dannyrohit|12 years ago|reply
Also, if you have the tools (and I would recommend buying a small electronics tool set to everyone, because it's a lot cheaper and funner to fix stuff yourself than to pay someone to fix it), then you can buy a complete LCD + digitizer for $36 on Amazon. [2]
[1]http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/111483/iPhone+5+cracked+g...
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Generic-Screen-Digitizer-Assembly-Repl...
[+] [-] drfritznunkie|12 years ago|reply
I ran into Ian and Jin from Dangerous Prototypes at the SF Bay MakerFaire last weekend where they were demonstrating the BGA reballing techniques we learned at the Land Mobile Repair School in Shenzhen. Ian told me that earlier in the Faire, a couple of Intel engineers stopped by to tell him that what he was doing was wrong, incorrect and impossible (or some combination thereof). He ran them through the process and left them agog, not only that the process developed by the Chinese (about $50USD in tools and supplies) was comparable to a $XX,000 reballing machine, but that they'd never seen or heard of these techniques before. They were throwing away prototypes worth thousands of dollars instead of fixing the problem because they didn't have proper reballing machines/jigs.
It is well worth the trip to Shenzhen if only to see them disassemble a phone completely and refurb it faster than imaginable. Ian hopes to make HCS a regular event and I highly recommend it!
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retr0spectrum|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardonunez|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
> I had originally assumed that the glass on the digitizer is inseparable from the OLED, but apparently those clever folks in Hua Qiang Bei have figured out an efficient method...
There is a large amount of skill involved. I saw a designer take apart a smartphone to use the digitizer in a "looks like works like" prototype. Getting the glue off and otherwise dissembling a smartphone screen without breaking anything is not easy! It's not meant to be repairable. And this guy is a wizard at building prototypes.
[+] [-] readme|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] qwerta|12 years ago|reply
Some level of replace-ability should be enforced by law. There should be universal interchangeable types of batteries. Board self-test should be available and so on.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzwinck|12 years ago|reply
Also, you do not want a phone made by the government.
[+] [-] pjc50|12 years ago|reply
(The EU charger standard is a good example: it works very well at eliminating the stupid proliferation of chargers which end up in landfill or WEEE, but not everyone is happy with micro-USB and arguably it's now the weak point in many phones which causes them to break early)
[+] [-] pling|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakejake|12 years ago|reply
I tried it and the phone did seem to go into some diagnostic mode and showed "please wait" for about 5 seconds, then just stopped with "Unknown Error" Sad.
[+] [-] amolsarva|12 years ago|reply
I have tried to replace the set on an ipod touch in the past. Didn't succeed. Screwed up taking the face/body assembly apart.
[+] [-] pyb|12 years ago|reply