Is Break/Fix Hardware repair business at end of life?

[britechguy]

Ironically most of my boomer clients sit there and leave the laptop plugged in 24/7 lol...then on the rare case they use the battery they wonder why it doesn't last long at all.

And no matter how much independent research you can point to that's peer reviewed that says try to stick, essentially, to charging only when levels get to approximately 20% and stopping at 80%, you've got the crowd of endless deniers.

At least the manufacturers have gotten smart and a very great many are now building AI charging schemes into their devices by default. I've been using the simple "stop at 80" that's on my laptop since I first got it, and make a point of taking it off charger and allowing it to run down to near 20 percent, sometimes a bit less, but not zero, before charging again. The phone I just bought has a "straight 80" setting as well as an AI setting.

 

[Murn1954]

I've been learning more and more about component level diagnosis and circuits in general. I'm probably better than half way towards a minor in EE at this point (not actually taking classes... it would be a youtube degree lol).

MasterCard was generous with the severance so I'll be fine for quite a while. While I am very actively pursing to finish my career in software engineering (I'll be 40 this year and was intending to "retire" at around 55).... I am watching for deals on used IR rework stations and other gear to do more advanced BGA rework and a better trinocular scope than the one I have.

Even just banging out HDMI ports on a PS5 is very profitable. I can get about $100 for one and I can have that job done start to finish in less than 30 minutes. 10 if I'm brought just the board.

The main faults on most laptops are pretty similar hardware wise. A $2000 Dell precision laptop with a shorted capacitor or blown mosfet can be $200 in your pocket for 15 minutes worth of work. Of course, they aren't paying for the 15 minutes. They are paying for thousands of dollars of tools that you have, and the decades of learning and experience.


The same principle applies in software and automation too: the hard part usually isn't the final action, it's having the experience to diagnose the issue quickly and build a reliable process around it. For transparency, in some projects we've used https://latenode.com/products/embedded-ipaas to avoid spending time maintaining every individual integration ourselves.

this is a really interesting direction to go in, especially with a software background. The crossover between software debugging and board-level diagnosis is bigger than a lot of people realize — the mindset is pretty similar: understand the system, isolate the failure point, test assumptions, and avoid replacing random parts.