I think I'm finally going to give in and start doing tablet repairs. Unfortunately I can't do iPads or iPhones because of a prior agreement, but I'm free to do everything else.
I used to do ipod repairs pretty regularly and started to really hate it when I started getting only the ipod touch in, so we dropped that service.
So, I have a few questions for those that're doing this regularly. (I searched first, didn't find much info)
1: What do you charge for the labor to repair a tablet? How about a phone?
2. How difficult is it to find parts? Where do you get them, and how quickly do they ship?
3. Are there any secret resources for take-apart guides? (Other than youtube, and just google searching)
4. Finally, if you do phone repair, what complications do you run into with carriers and customers being without their phone...and things like that? I might decide against phone repair for now.
Too bad you are unable to do the iPhones . . . As for the rest of the phones, we have opted out of them. We did them for a while but there are just so many of them (hundreds if not thousands) that it is hard to become proficient at repairing them. It would be fine if you could charge enough for them, but at least around here, you would have to charge more than what the customers insurance would be or in the very least more than they want to spend. Android phones were such a small portion (both in volume and profit) of what phones we did repair, that it just made more sense to concentrate on iPhones and iPods. We do tons of iPod touches and once you learn how to do it, its pretty quick. The 2nd and 3rd gen can be done in a matter of minutes in many case and the 4th gen takes about a half hour.
Android tablets is still a working progress for us. The problem is that many of them are very cheap and thus not worth repairing because of how much we would have to charge in order for them to be worth our time. Currently the Galaxy, Transformer and 10inch Google Tablets are probably the most profitable.
iPads, I absolutely hate working on and I most definitely charge for our time.
Now to answer your questions more specifically.
1: What do you charge for the labor to repair a tablet? How about a phone?
It really depends. Like I said, the tablets are a working progress. At this point, we are charging at least $100 for labor, not including markup on parts.
iPhones we charge $100 for both the screen and labor. We can do these in 20 minutes . . . are you sure you can rework that agreement?
The main issue is that when working in a computer shop, the cell phones actually take priority due to them being the customers life lines. We try not to hang on to a phone for more than 1 to 2 hours. As for the Android phones, we would have to order the parts first (customer pays for them up front) and when they came in, we would call the customer to set up a time to have their phone repaired.
2. How difficult is it to find parts? Where do you get them, and how quickly do they ship?
I am not going to list our suppliers on this thread since it is not a private . . . I will PM you though.
3. Are there any secret resources for take-apart guides? (Other than youtube, and just google searching)
iFixit is good if they have a manual for whatever you are working on.
4. Finally, if you do phone repair, what complications do you run into with carriers and customers being without their phone...and things like that? I might decide against phone repair for now.
Again, time is an issue. There are 3 main issues with working on Android phones.
1. You are literally relearning how to work on a phone each time you work on a different phone. Sure, the concepts are the same, but cable placements, snap tabs, and other things are located in different places and can be easily broken if not careful. Things like having to re-adhere the glass is time consuming and in many cases has to be done differently for each phone due to there being no precut adhesive strips. Another issue is that many ribbon cables are soldered onto the board and rip very easily. This may not be a problem if you know how to solder ribbon cables on to circuit boards, but it is an issue when you can't purchase the parts. Basically, the chances of you screwing up and wasting your time is greatly increased with Android phones due to the variation of phones available.
2. Parts: Due to the fact that there are so many Android phones, it is very hard to keep them in stock. Maybe it is just me, but when we were repairing Android phones, we rarely ever saw the same phone come in more than once or twice, making the parts not worth keeping in stock. Our solution was to order these parts as we needed to, but there is a problem with that as well. If you received a defective part, then you have to reorder, and if it is a screen, then often times the old screen is not useable anymore. Sure, you could order 2 at the same time, but I have literally had 2 or more in the row be defective or in the very least hung on to an extra part that never got used.
3. Time and Money: Finally, since you are relearning each Android phone every time you receive a different one, you are taking a significant amount of more time on the repairs. This means that the customer has to be without the phone for longer than they would like. This also means that if you screw up or if the part is defective, then you have to wait even longer. Obviously since time is money, then you can see how easily your money will go down the drain. And again, the fact that it is hard to charge a decent amount for your time makes it even harder.
In all, one of the best decisions that we recently made was dropping Android phone repairs.
