As a Shenzhen local, I'd consider this video one of very few that present a 100% accurate view of the local hardware and market culture. It's very well done and everything he says is correct and that's unusual.
That really means a lot, especially coming from you. I tried really, really hard to accurately portray Shenzhen and the markets, and it's nice to hear from a local maker that I've at least partly succeeded. Thank you:)
I'd say the same as someone who lives in Hong Kong and travels to Shenzhen with some frequency.
With one caveat, those folks selling parts definitely treats me with a lot less friendliness than they do with foreign buyers, especially when you're buying just one.
There are also varying level of quality when buying parts, especially batteries and screens. It's hard for repair shops in the area to charge higher prices for better parts, so there's definitely a huge market for screens that's slightly mis-calibrated, has a non-noticeable dead pixel and such. Customers in the area generally care less about those kind of quality.
> With one caveat, those folks selling parts definitely treats me with a lot less friendliness than they do with foreign buyers, especially when you're buying just one.
Yeah, that really sucks. There's definitely a lot of pretty apparent white privilege here, which I try to be really aware of and not take unfair advantage of. But it can be tricky to navigate at times.
>Yeah, that really sucks. There's definitely a lot of pretty apparent white privilege here, which I try to be really aware of and not take unfair advantage of. But it can be tricky to navigate at times.
Trust me- they treat me better than they treat you:P There are other cases where White makers/hardware people can be a bit problematic on the local scene, but not so much in the markets. I've seen African, Middle Eastern traders accommodated in much the same way. And the good treatment probably comes with a slight markup so evens out in the end.
Wow, like the other posters, I was impressed with your accurate portrayal of Shenzhen.
But I do have to say this comment surprises me even more as many of the expats I've met are either blind to or aren't willing to admit there is white privilege there (and other parts of Asia).
I'm really glad there are people like you as our "ambassadors."
Never been to Shenzhen but as a Malaysian, it looks a lot like a roti canai, which is an Indian-influenced flatbread. There are frozen ones sold internationally (I've personally seen them in grocery stores in the UK and South Korea) so they may be available where you are. It might be called either roti canai or roti paratha on the packaging.
Totally unrelated but I loved your Hikaru Skirt and made one for my gf back then as a bday present (to go to a Vocalid live). It helped me to design and hide a small box and get similar electronics.
>Totally unrelated but I loved your Hikaru Skirt and made one for my gf back then as a bday present (to go to a Vocalid live). It helped me to design and hide a small box and get similar electronics.
I think one of the huge differences in east vs west electronics/maker/hacker communities is the approach of DIY vs using production services. In the US, as a hobbyist with a limited budget, if you want to have a PCB made, you either send it off to OSH Park and wait weeks, or you try and make it yourself and get pretty low quality results. Here in Shenzhen, nobody even considers it. You upload the file to professional board house, and standard turn around is 3-4 days. For $30 more, you can get 24-hour turnaround.
So there's just this really different approach of "what can I make myself with the tools I own" versus "what professional services do I have access to, and which of my friends have factories with the right production equipment".
As a result, you see stark difference in quality of initial prototypes.
The flip side is that I think western makers/hackers are more focused on coming up with completely new ideas, with less of a focus on quality of execution, whereas a lot of chinese makers/hackers/manufacturers are more focused on iterative improvement - how can I be really clever to make something cheaper or easier to produce, that looks like a professional product. Both sides are very clever and creative, but focus on different aspects.
>The flip side is that I think western makers/hackers are more focused on coming up with completely new ideas, with less of a focus on quality of execution, whereas a lot of chinese makers/hackers/manufacturers are more focused on iterative improvement - how can I be really clever to make something cheaper or easier to produce, that looks like a professional product. Both sides are very clever and creative, but focus on different aspects.
Really well edited video. Shenzen seems like a crazy awesome place. One thing I noticed was how he would never haggle on the price. He would always accept straight up say yep ok. Either the prices were really good...or being an American he's not so used to the idea of having to haggle the price (or maybe he felt order size was too small to warrant a haggle). However when in Asia always and negotiate, otherwise you're just increasing the prices for the rest of the expats :)
No- under these circumstances you don't haggle. They mostly sell quantity to people they know, they are stopping real business to be polite and do him a favor. Likewise, if you buy 5 switches in SEG, it's going to be like $2 and it's just not the time for it. Source- Shenzhen local.
yes exactly - if you're going to Shenzhen figure out which buildings will sell you 10 and which are really there to sell you 10,000, the market prices to you are already cheaper than what you're used to for most stuff anyway.
If you do need 10,000 you're probably buying reels anyway, there are places that will sell you those, and if you really are manufacturing get a local sourcing agent to help you they will know who sells reliable stuff at a good price
He has commented on that saying that it isn't very common in the electronics markets, particularly for one-offs or low volume. Apparently you can only really start haggling once you're buying 100+ of something.
This isn't your normal Asian market. Most of us are happy that we can even make our clumsy attempts at buying sample quantities without speaking the language nor having a local business. There's little evidence of a "foreigner tax" in effect, if anything you're getting better prices and service because you're a curiosity.
When purchasing electronics haggling isn't really very common. The haggling comes when you buy in bulk. But you're right, if you buy things on a market in Asia; haggle!
I've tried to fix the screen on an iPad and an iPhone. In both cases, I destroyed a ribbon cable connector and rendered the devices useless. I tried to follow the instructions, I tried to use proper tools and go as slowly as possible, and in both cases, the delicate surface mount connectors just turned into powder and flaked right off the board.
You must be doing something wrong. I have had my original iPhone 5 since release in 2013. Ive replaced essentailly every part in the phone but the mainboard. I just bought a parts phone on ebay for $20 and completely replaced the digitizer. Battery replacements are $5 and take two minutes. Ive even replaced the entire lightning port assembly for 7$ in parts and an hour of time. Its the most modular easily repaired phone Ive ever owned. Granted though, this is the original iPhone 5. All the newer phones with Touch ID and force touch digitizers are more expensive/complicated. But the notion that Apple phones are not repairable is just false.
I just have very bad luck when things get small. I was so proud of myself when I got all that broken iPad glass off cleanly. Then that happened and it was a really dark moment for me.
Currently I'm dealing with an out of warranty Apple Watch where the screen just went and fell right off, and apparently you cannot buy the glue strips for it unless you buy the whole screen. Apple figured out how to stop people from getting glue!
As a side note: this issue happened to some early Apple watches (basically the glue didn't cure properly, I think?). Since it's a sorta known issue, you might be able to get it fixed for free, even though it's out of warranty.
Yeah I went through multiple phone calls and an unpleasant store visit and mentioned the people online and they did jack all for me. They want $249 and that's that. They didn't care about my 6 figures of lifetime Apple purchases.
I've repaired iPhone 5's, no problem. I've repaired the screen on a 6 and swore I'd never attempt such a thing again. Too many fiddly, delicate parts and screen glass that's bonded to the LCD. If nothing else I'd buy the whole screen and not just the glass. But the fiddly rest of it still puts me off trying again.
5 minutes to replace the battery? When I replaced the battery on my iPhone 5S (maybe it's a lot harder?) it took maybe an hour in total. The biggest issue I had was with the glue holding the old battery in. I used a hair dryer to heat up the back of the phone so it was hot to touch, but even so it still took a lot of prying - the old battery was very deformed by the time I got it free.
On a side note, iPhones are really easy to get parts for. I had the digitiser fail on a cheap no-name Android tablet, and as far as I can tell you can't get replacement parts for it.
> Ive replaced essentailly every part in the phone but the mainboard
For fun? Or what? I have several relatives who still have iPhone 4 and 5 (and one with a 3!), and none of them have replaced any components. Why would you need to?
Just FYI, even if you ripped a pin on the FPC (the connector on the logic board), your devices are still repairable. Board-level repair is becoming more common these days, and there are plenty of people all over the world who can replace FPCs on your board.
For those curious and don't want to watch the entire video: He uses an iphone backplate, three other parts (touch id etc), and the logic board. So he's using Apple OS.
Ah - ok, this explains it. I didn't watch the video, and I had it in my mind that he custom built a phone (and they were just using the term as a headline grab). I was trying to figure out how/where he got a 4G module.
Makes me wish you could buy a kit and assemble your own phone. We need someone like Arduino to come along for this kind of tech. Would be awesome to just pick up my old and faithful Hakko and solder some sensor to a phone.
Depending on what you're thinking of when you say "phone", you can do that. 3G modem, controller (either a microcontroller like Arduino or one of the smaller Linux-based ARM computers), various LCD options, and either touch or buttons for input. People have built variations on that.
Put a smaller GPIO connection on the screen, and you could probably make it 1/3 the thickness of the original one. Still much more powerful than my first Android phone, and you could set it up with much quicker software. Actually getting to feature parity even with most feature phones would take some serious work, though.
Well it doesn't really .. that's what it cost Scotty doing it the way he did. He was making a video to highlight that phones live on after you throw them away. He probably wasn't trying to make a profit, he was trying to make an interesting movie.
If you visit the markets where he's buying you'll find a virtual disassembly line breaking down phones into component parts (to logic boards if they still work, and chips if they don't) followed by an assembly line of people making 'new' phones from those parts. The thing is that there are people in the "dodgy cell phone market" (people call it that) who are making a good living (by local norms) building iPhones, sometimes from scratch with recycled parts
Yep. In the video comments, he says he spent well over $1000. Justifies the $300 price tag by stating that he didn't need the $700+ worth of parts and tools he purchased.
> Strange Parts 4 hours ago
> Thanks for subscribing! I spent well over $1000, but a lot of that was parts and tools I didn't end up needing. I'd say it's probably around $300 worth of parts in the actual phone.
The extra parts cost was from a dead end where he was going to attempt to populate a bare PCB with the various chips etc. Eventually he found someone that told him just how many boards he'd have to make before he'd get a working board trying to do it by hand.
For what it's worth, he did pay for almost all of the assembly. He bought an assembled mainboard, and paid about 70 bucks for the assembly on the screen (in addition to what he already paid for parts).
All those people and all that parts infrastructure, just to repair and recycle one brand of phones. Phone repair training school with posters of iPhone boards on the wall. All those shops selling phone parts. All that specialized equipment for servicing them. I like the "bubble removing" machine, a heated vacuum chamber. It looks like mid 20th century automotive, when there were corners with four gas stations that actually could fix cars, and many automotive machine shops.
Why should phones break? It's not like they can't be made much tougher.[1] The real question is, why do people put up with such fragile phones? Is this an interim stage of the technology? Does this stop when iPhone N+1 comes out and the reaction is "yawn?"
So what does all that Shentzen parts retail look like when you're building something new? Can you go into those buildings with a bill of materials and come out ready to load your pick and place machine? Can you get boards fabbed one-off while you wait? Or is it all about repair and simple mods?
Scotty here, the dude that made the video. I'm not sure I can answer the first set of questions about why phones are fragile. I think it probably has something to do with consumer expectations/tastes around look and size of phones though.
But I can give you some answers for your second set of questions.
> So what does all that Shentzen parts retail look like when you're building something new?
The markets originally started as wholesale components and tools markets to service the electronics factories in Shenzhen, which make a significant fraction of the worlds electronics, particularly commodity electronics. So it actually mostly caters to people building new things, versus repair. But I didn't show any of that in the video. My understanding is that the cell phone repair markets are comparatively much newer, and obviously cater much less to large scale production of new goods.
> Can you go into those buildings with a bill of materials and come out ready to load your pick and place machine?
Yes, absolutely. There are multiple buildings of distributers that do nothing but sell components on reels to load in pick and place machines. You can even buy a pick and place machine there if you need.
> Can you get boards fabbed one-off while you wait?
Not quite while you wait. There are a bunch of booths in the markets advertising these sorts of services though. I think the fastest on the PCB fab itself (without assembling any components on it) is 12-hour turn time, and that's pushing it a bit. 24-hour turn time expedited but pretty standard, and 3-4 days is generally the non-expedited standard for the board house I've used. Sometimes a bit longer if they're really busy. A courier on a motorcycle will bring it to your door.
> Or is it all about repair and simple mods?
The cell phone markets are mainly about repair/refurbishing and simple mods, as far as I can tell. But I don't fully know - there's still a ton more for me to learn. I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface here.
Reading your replies(can't watch the video, I'm at work - chef here), really makes me wish I was back coding. Which would give me time to do things like this! Do you have a blog or is this a one off?
I suspect it's due to the short effective lifetime due to obsolescence.
Ruggedised phones and cases are already available. The average person doesn't mind much, although there's strong nostalgia for the indestructible era of early Nokias.
The vertically integrated nature of the industry means you have to choose one of Apple or Android; and if you choose Apple, you're stuck with whatever products they choose to offer.
They are usually invalid if you have the right tools and know what you are doing, but they are usually based off an assumption that your average person has a screwdriver and a hair dryer and nothing else. Anything that requires a soldering iron to replace is pretty much a 1/10, even if it's a really simple fix that can be done after looking up some videos on youtube.
Ha! I met Scotty (the man featured in this video) in Bali, Indonesia about 1.5 years ago. We wound up crossing paths a few more times at a hackerspace after I moved to SF. As you can imagine, he's an incredibly focused but personable guy. Hope to see more videos like this!
I haven't watched the video - but I'm curious where and how he got a 4G LTE module cheaply. I've never found one via Ali Express or TaoBao, but maybe I didn't use the right keywords (or maybe they aren't available as modules?). The best I've been able to find are 3G modules; the 4G ones I have found (from one or two US suppliers) tended to be extremely expensive.
EDIT: NVM all - downthread it was explained what this guy did, and how he didn't go true DIY on the whole thing. So no special 4G module needed.
Aside from your edit: I have heard (but cannot back up) that there are sometimes things you can buy in person in Shenzhen but not on Taobao. It's hard to believe though.
Great experiment, and it looks like a lot of fun. But to be practical, the amount of time + effort + risk required to pull this of would offset any amount of money saved.
Yeah, I can imagine him turning this into something similar to the "What's Inside" Family" where the goal isn't so much cost-saving vs exploring how things are made.
I don't know, is it possible that activating iOS might be rejected because the logic board serial number is blacklisted by Apple for any number of reasons?
Moral of the story is not how cheap YOU can build YOUR phone by $300, but how cheap Chinese electronic parts could mean to the competition and innovation in the whole electronic industry.
My personal opinion (not necessarily correct): it means that electronic industry could no longer only compete on low prices but newer designs and newer technologies, for better or worse, because Shenzhen, China can always catch up with your price fast with its astonishingly cheap parts.
> but how cheap Chinese electronic parts could mean to the competition and innovation in the whole electronic industry.
There are already plenty of cheap Chinese phones you can buy. Even their flagship phones with top of the line specs are half price. They just don't support all overseas bands yet.
If you read his blog post he mentions that the logic board is recycled and he thinks that alot of iphone 6 parts come from recycled/broken phones.
quote from the blog about the logic board:
"The one I bought is refurbished/repaired, almost undoubtedly from a real, legitimately purchased phone made by Apple that was recycled at some point."
Apple should add many QA steps filtering out the vast majority of bad parts. First there would be incoming QA on any received shipments. And any well run assembly line contains many check steps to make sure the unit has good constituent parts. This way you don't burn good parts farther down the line on a unit that was never going to pass. Then there is out going inspection and burn in testing.
All that testing increases overall quality and value.
In theory that's possible true but in practice on an iPhone I highly doubt a DIY can do "the exact same thing". For one there are important ports we can't access, like JTAG testing the SOC. And there is a whole other factory OS which we have no idea what it does and why.
Given the large amount of iPhones that get smashed and then sent to recycling (in Shenzhen) loong before the battery is near EoL, my guess is these are likely genuine, used Apple batteries.
There are very few YouTube videos that I particularly enjoy watching, this was one of them.
Interesting topic, well filmed given the market circumstances, clear audio, and well edited.. and it definitely didn't hurt that I'm currently learning how to design and build electronics from scratch as a hobby ;)
Somewhat reminded me of the fairphone documentary which follows someone trying to build a phone business (i.e. Talking with suppliers/factories/etc.): https://youtu.be/7C-VTPJxWlw
One of the very best documentaries I 've ever watched. My most favorite part on describing modern Chinese culture : the need to replace the logic board, and the seller's reaction : 'legit'. In China people still are, indeed, very honorable.
As a foreigner living in SZ for the past few years, and literally 3 minutes away from the markets, I have to say, well done Scotty for capturing the mess and awesomeness of Huaqiang Bei. Shame that the markets won't stay like this for long though :(
Because rent prices are going up in huaqiang bei, and the average seller selling passives or other electronic parts cant sell enough to pay the rent.
Already there are more and more malls and fashion shops slowly appearing in the area, and landlords will be more and more willing to replace sellers selling resistors over a fancy fashion shop paying double or triple for that space.
he looks so tired at the end of it, the video is well edited too, where he'll skip over what's probably long hours and tedious failures with small or sped up clips
How many of these parts are genuine? Many of the parts are so specific to the iPhone they can't be generic off the shelf components. Some seem impossible to knock off like the SoC or the touch sensors.
If you find a genuine part, that works, is it stolen? Some aesthetic problem? Some defect that doesn't quite render it unusable?
I stay far away from non OEM stuff when repairing iPhones. You can get cracked screen and iCloud locked parts phones on ebay for dirt cheap. Everything but the mainboard is usable.
He writes on he's blog that he thinks a lot of parts are recycled
You might wonder why I chose to make an iPhone 6s and not an iPhone 7. I had two reasons...
However, the other reason, which turned out to be far more important, is that iPhone 7 parts are pretty hard to come by in the markets. It’s not totally clear why this is, but I have some ideas. A lot of the parts come from recycled/broken phones, and so it would make sense that there just isn’t that much supply yet.
He seems to think a lot of the parts are refurbished from original iPhones, with a mix I imagine of pretty good copies. I've bought some non-OEM replacement parts for Android phones and the copies have been pretty phenomenal, so I'm not sure where the mix falls.
I had to laugh at the hand-drawn logos on the kiosk of the guys who owned the 'Remove Bubble Machine'.
Hi, Scotty here - the guy that made the video. bspn pretty much nails it. I don't really know for certain, but I think a lot of the parts are used/refurbished from original iPhones, with a couple parts that are really good copies mixed in. Everything is pretty top notch quality as far as I can tell though.
And the screen repair booth art is totally legit. As is their workbench organization scheme.
Hey: Don't work in IT but do play a lot in it, I'm probably an atypical HN reader being "outside of the bubble" but have always wished I had pursued a career in IT.. Anyway..
As a sideline to my daily job that pays national average I spent a couple of years repairing iPhones for friends, family and colleagues, mainly screen replacement which are trivial after a few, but also battery / switch / button / port replacements which are also trivial but often require a small insight into the mechanics of the part as differing screw lengths, different torquing forces etc can Stop power buttons depressing smoothly, all the way down to minor board level repair with (single SMT component replacements, a few BGA REFLOWS { which have a relatively low success rate with only a hot air station }).
The biggest tips I would give to anyone who wants to perform trivial repairs such as battery replacements is to buy a quality set of screwdrivers (PH000, PH00, pentalobe for iPhone, flathead that will be used 2 or 3 times per board) an openesesame type pry tool, a rigid pry tool (never lever against the board, always the side of the case and then with care)' a cheap suction device to remove the screen, a spare set of screws for your phone (you will lose screws with quite a frequency). Apart from that buy some E6000 glue with small applicator nozzle, some quality superglue (sometimes it's needed), small amounts of Methy Ethyl Ketone (MEK) solvent as well as 99.9% Isopropyl Acohol (IPA is often mixed 70/30 with water for medical purposes, don't use this).
Always keep your screen away from the solvents, MEK will dissolve even the most stubborn glue on the battery, IPA Should be used with a cotton bud (Q-Tip for the Americans?) to lightly clean both male and female FPC connectors prior to replacement, let the solvents dry before putting your screen close.
Apply a small amount if E6000 to everything that's meant to already have adhesive pads on, and with regard to screen replacements the FPCS for then LCD, digitiser, screen auxiliaries (earpiece, front camera) has a metal cover which keeps everything secure, one or two of the screws is a fraction of a mm shorter than another, put the longer one in the shorter hole and you get a BSOD where you have cut screwed through a layer of PCB to the next and broken its trace.
The biggest watch out is that spare parts come in 3 categories, reused from original iPhone, generally superior, "OEM" grade (thought strictly they probably aren't OEM, but they are superior grade) and generic. Try to avoid the generic, often the original/OEM are a few £/$ more expensive but when you've spend an hour stripping a phone and installing a part only for it to not work or to have a partial defect, you will wish you bought quality (anyone remember the black iPhone 4 with the proximity/ambient light sensor from hell, until you used a genuine part that had a polarised film and small foam gasket that stopped ambient light creeping in from the backlight?
He did attempt to build a logic board - there a short montage of his frustration trying to do so, and an interview with a guy who teaches the locals how to build them - I've got a lot of experience soldering at that level, I regularly work under a microscope, and I'd avoid trying to solder the really fine caps (more like dust) on those boards
He answered in a comment. It was about 300 USD in parts but he's not sure because he'd spent a lot of money gearing up to try to populate a bare logic board pcb by hand before someone talked him out of it.
Yeah but as I said a lot of those tools were for populating a bare logic board though that he didn't end up doing because a repair shop told him he could expect to waste 4+ boards before making on that worked so I don't really think that's part of the cost of the phone since they weren't used in the final product or making it.
"I'm really impressed by Apple's engineering. It's so easy to repair and recycle these phones. I've gotta think that Apple's really proud that their phones don't really end up in landfills."
He then adds, "But there's also credit due to the many thousands of people here who have figured out how to turn trash like this [shows mangled screen assembly] back into beautiful working phones."
Dear friends in Shenzhen, not all Westerner's are as shallow and fantastically, well, douchey as this asshole. We praise you for your ingenuity and unwavering work ethic. Thank you.
Calling "shallow" the OP but also calling all people in Shenzhen your friends ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The 1st person face is a bit shocking, and he does seem a bit naive at some points, but from that to call Scotty Allen "shallow and fantastically douchey asshole" is totally uncalled for.
