Louis Rossmann proves that such a business does work and is profitable while remaining significantly cheaper for customers (otherwise he wouldn't get any business).
You can have a B2B business model where local stores replace phones for customers and then mail the broken phones in bulk to a repair center.
So that's somewhere between 62.5k and 125k per employee annually in revenue. He's doing well enough but its not exactly a money printing machine and you would assume a person at the top of his industry is doing significantly better than anyone else could.
I do think its quite possible to make a living doing this in most places, but there's easier ways for people with that level of technical skills to make more money so it remains to be seen how many will choose to do it.
That being said I'm 100% supportive of right to repair and I'm a fan of Louis's content.
The geographical location of the repairer does not matter because shipping is a thing.
And the fact that these repairers will charge per repair rather than a flat fee for partial replacements of entire boards like OEMs do means they can be cost effective while profitable.
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Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.
Between the 40 cent cost of the component and labor, there's a lot of meat left for individual repairers left to make money.
I wasn't suggesting it did matter in regards to his mail-in business. Someone else mentioned that living in a large city makes it easier to maintain a high volume of work locally.
>Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.
This is true. My point was that when a large computer repair shop run by arguably the most famous person in the electronics repair industry is only attracting enough work to have an annual revenue of 1-2 million a year, it could be entirely possible that a regular, non-famous person in a smaller electronics business might struggle to stay busy enough to earn enough of a living, even if certain repairs like the one you described are very profitable on their own.
Most places I've lived had a shop or two where someone would repair things like logic boards for cheap, using grey market parts.
You don't need 1-2 million a year to keep the lights on, there's people doing this stuff in their garages.
That is not the only consideration either, data recovery is as well, since most of the time that $475 also means your device is wiped and all data lost, an independent shop could even charge someone that same $475 but retain the data and it would be worth it to the customer.
You are really overestimating the value of those skills. You don't need a college degree to run a hot air reflow station. It's a valuable skill but I'd be shocked if it was worth even a quarter of your estimate, even in NYC.
Even if running a hot air reflow station were a supremely difficult skill which required decades to master, the market value of a skill like that depends on the employee's ability to demand better compensation from competing employers. How many repair shops even have equipment like that? It's a very specific skill set, particular to an industry which is struggling due to lack of right to repair protections.
Actually that is exactly what you are doing, and you know that is what you are doing or you would not have needed to add the equivocation
I actually have a high degreee of distaste for apple phones, their app store walled garden ecosystem, et cetera. The last iphone I owned was an original iphone 2G I purchased new for some absurd price in 2007. I own a Macbook Air because it's a good thin, light terminal that I can use to remotely control my other stuff, and I was fully aware of the fact that the RAM and SSD are soldered onto the all-in-one motherboard when I bought it. The odds of having a laptop motherboard failure are low enough that I chose to roll the dice. Everything else of mine is x86-64 whitebox that I built myself.
Probably 0.01% of Apple product owners in North America also own a hot air reflow station and have the skills/practice to use it safely on a very densely populated laptop or phone motherboard.
I would also wager that if you were to look at the pay scale for skilled electronics repair people capable of safely doing so with little risk of killing the board, the market rate for a person running a hot air reflow station to do that work, in a big city in north america (chicago, SF, seattle, NY, etc) might be $200/hour. By the time you were to pay for the repair service and the parts it might not be economical.
One of the things that seems to be much more common in mainland China is that random small phone/laptop repair shops have the technical capability in house to do this sort of work. In the USA the same shops' technical abilities are limited to what can be done with some tweezers, a set of precision screwdrivers, prying tools/spudgers, etc.
Note that I am not excusing apple's terrible repair parts availability or pricing, or other practices which make it difficult for a trained third party to acquire and install legit parts.