India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

During my middle school days, we lived in a small town for a little while (read: A place where i was allowed to take my bicycle out onto the main road).<p>After school, I used to spend a lot of time just hanging out around some TV and radio repair shops and just watched them work. They used to be friendly and gave me parts like spare motors, lights that were lying around from broken Walkmans they wouldn&#x27;t repair. I took those motors and added to my bicycle as a &quot;dynamo light&quot; , built &quot;wired RC car&quot; etc ...<p>Fast forward to a few years ago when i got into building racing drones, soldering certain tiny wires was difficult for me. I went to a nearby mobile repair shop to get that done and he was happy to help me out.<p>I owe a lot of my curiosity and my knowledge today to these repair shops.<p>It&#x27;s not a good thing that our electronics are becoming less and less repairable these days. No wonder these repair shops are vanishing as the time progresses.<p>The closest thing to that we have these days are makerspaces. At our local makerspace we encourage people try to fix their broken electronics instead of throwing them away. But I feel like there should be more.

It&#x27;s simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As&#x2F;When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.

A few years ago, I wanted to add more RAM to a Lenovo laptop. I opened the thing, remove the RAM, and like a complete idiot, switched on the power without any RAM in the slot.<p>The laptop refused to start.<p>I took it to the Lenovo center and they said about 7-10 days and a minimum of Rs 10,000 (about $150 in those days).<p>Since this was too much for an old laptop, I looked for alternatives. Someone suggested a repair shop in Nehru Place, New Delhi<p>This was tucked into the back of the basement of a big tower. A tiny 10x10 room filled with laptop parts<p>The guy at the counter looked at the laptop, opened it up, twisted some wires around, added another few wires, and the thing was working again<p>Total time: under 10 minutes.<p>Total cost: Rs 200 - just about $2.5 today

I remember up to the early 1990&#x27;s we had repair shops all over Portugal, we would buy devices for life, and any kind of malfunction would be rescued at one of those repair shops, unless it was really a death sentence for the device.<p>Now in a throw away society with planned obsolence devices, most of those shops are gone and the repair knowledge gone with them.<p>Unless goverments fix the planned obsolence culture it is almost impossible to have the repair culture back.

I spent many a weekends at Nehru Place, even though it was a 90 mins drive and the parking ... oh the parking, well if you want to test your patience this is this is the place to go.<p>But for a hardware &#x2F; gaming junkie this was the place to be. Not to mention (pirated &#x2F; photocopied) books. Almost any book &#x2F; media you could dream of. The lanes are buzzing with scamsters &#x2F; pirates and geniuses who can build &#x2F; repair anything - phones, TVs, PCs, laptops, watches etc. At one time Nehru Place was the &quot;IT&quot; hub of New Delhi. The street food was not half bad as well. I was just happy watching the men at work in dinky shops fixing anything, built a few PCs there (a tradition which continues to this day).<p>Some happy memories (but you have to be careful or you will need to walk back home without your wallet and your shirt).<p>Edit: 2 movies to understand this culture (a bit more) -<p>- Rocket Singh (salesman of the year)<p>- Mickey Virus

This reminded me of something that happened to a friend of mine not long ago. He’d just been laid off from a pretty good Salesforce Admin job and was already in a tight spot financially when his laptop’s motherboard fried after a voltage spike.<p>Local shops were quoting ₹25,000–₹30,000 (roughly $300–$360), which he just couldn’t afford. Then a friend told him about Nehru Place. He sent the laptop there through someone he knew, and the repair only cost him around ₹5,000–₹10,000 ($60–$120). Way more reasonable.<p>He was glad to get it fixed without spending a lot but it does make you wonder how reliable those reused parts are. Like, how long is it gonna hold up before something else goes wrong?

Not the same thing as this article, but I was impressed with the Chinese trend of “fixing” 2015-era MacBook Pros with broken screens by deleting the screen and installing a blanking plate, leaving the machine as a sort of C64&#x2F;Amiga&#x2F;ST&#x2F;Acorn style keyboard-and-CPU single unit that could be plugged into an HDMI screen. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ioshacker.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;people-in-china-are-using-macbook-pro-without-screen-and-now-i-want-one" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ioshacker.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;people-in-china-are-using-macbook...</a>

There was this famous guy, which sold custom old Thinkpads, but with newer mainboards and Intel 10th gen chips in it, with custom USB-C adapters and all.<p>At some point he kind of disappeared and rumors appeared that he is now in mandatory military service, but will come back afterwards. Well, that was pre-COVID.<p>He also knows a friend that backports coreboot to the new mainboards. No idea how they manage to do that in a 2 person project like this. So yeah, all of the laptops they sell run coreboot in it (including the Thunderbolt EC, which is insane amount of work to implement).<p>Nonetheless the build quality was insanely good, and lots of folks were amazed by what they essentially bet blindly on when they ordered it. The X2100 would be my dream laptop, but I didn&#x27;t manage to get one in time.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xyte.ch&#x2F;shop&#x2F;x2100-pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xyte.ch&#x2F;shop&#x2F;x2100-pricing&#x2F;</a>

I grew up in a poor Eastern European country which is not as poor anymore.<p>We repaired anything: worn out shoes, distressed socks and clothes. Even cooking pots were patched when they developed holes. Everything had very long lifetimes and those lifetimes were extended with periodic repairs.<p>Cars were rare and using parts of low quality made the break often. People repaired their cars in front of their houses or apartment buildings. Or on the side of the road if it broke there. Everyone carried big toolkits in their trunks and and almost any car owner or driver knew how to fix the car. If a tire ran flat, they had the tools to fix it on spot.<p>There were electronic repair shops everywhere. There were also other kind of repair shops.<p>If someone looked in the trash cans at the time, most of it was vegetable waste resulting from people cooking their meals.<p>It wasn&#x27;t unusual to own a 30 years old car, a 20 years washing machine, a 30 year radio or a 15 year black and white TV, all being repaired lots of times.<p>Some mass market goods, or most of them, were handed down to the next generation as priced possessions.<p>Now, we repair next to nothing. We still repair cars, although many people sell their old car if it breaks and buy a new one.<p>PC, TV, washing machines, fridges, furniture get replaced in a few years even if it&#x27;s in perfectly good condition.<p>Good got cheaper, although of uncertain quality and the wages got high so it&#x27;s expensive to repair something even if you find a place to do it. If you buy a new bicycle and go to the repair shop two or three times it will cost you the price of a new one.<p>I am not nostalgic about it, and I don&#x27;t think people should stick with old junk. But I do believe we need an equilibrium, goods should be of higher quality, easier and cheaper to repair. I dislike being forced to throw something away because it can&#x27;t be repaired, even if such a repair should be simple and cheap in theory.<p>We pay less for good and we don&#x27;t spend for the wages of repair technicians (almost none left) but since the goods are of low quality, have planned obsolescence built in and can&#x27;t be repaired, we end up buying the same good two or three times so we spend more. While that might create jobs in China or other remote country, I as a consumer, care more about my budget and my quality of life.

I&#x27;m living in Russia. Can&#x27;t say that we lived wealthy any time, maybe near 10 years at the beginning of XXI century. So the culture of repairs and repair shops is widely adopted here.<p>It is so widespread that even a special sort of frauds have been invented. First, a fake &quot;repair shop&quot; where you can lose money on paid &quot;diagnosis&quot; of broken parts or on extremely high cost of &quot;repair&quot;. Which is just an installation of less broken parts or non-original and cheap parts ordered in China.<p>Second is a fake repairman, who comes to fix someone&#x27;s PC and charges unreasonably high price for simple things, like cleaning the case from the dust or changing the thermal paste. Or even installs viruses to convince the user of the &quot;real problems&quot; and takes the computer to the &quot;repair shop&quot; where the obviously working parts will be stolen (swapped to smth cheap chinese parts) and the user ofc gets the unreasonably large paycheck for these operations.<p>Usually the technically illiterate people are the main target of such scammers.<p>---<p>I&#x27;m still using the PC from 2013 year and the heavily modified Thinkpad X220. Yes, maybe some operations (mostly the modern Web-related operations) take more time than on the modern computer (mostly because of JavaScript). But editing text, programming, watching videos and listening to audio still works pretty well.<p>Maybe, some day some time, the battery will be a problem. But it is detachable, so the main problem is the BMS (Battery Management System), which prevents me from just swapping the old battery cells for the new ones.<p>But for now it has 2K screen (installed it because photo editing with 1366x768 isn&#x27;t easy), new WiFi card with new WiFi revisions support and so on. Can say what this laptop have enormous repairability compared to the new laptops. One flaw — the CPU is soldered to the board, so I can&#x27;t change it to something newer, like I can do with much older laptops.

I used to do at-home computer troubleshooting as a part time job when was in college. Most of time it was just opening up the casing, dusting it and reattaching all the parts&#x2F;reinstalling Windows that did the trick. 90% of time it was just RAM popping out a bit. But in rare cases, it was the components themselves. I used to rely of these shops in the city (Hyderabad, India) that fixed motherboards etc. really cheap and relatively quickly (less than a week most of the time). People that worked there weren&#x27;t engineers or anything, more like tradesmen. It was amazing to see them work.

My Dell XPS-15 laptop&#x27;s screen was falling off. To fix it, I drilled holes right though the border area of the screen and fitted 4 bolts so that the screen stays with the laptop. My colleagues were horrified to see large bolts at the back of the screen, but everything worked like a charm.

I’d love to learn some of the advanced rework skills they need to work on modern motherboards - especially BGA part replacement. And how to build a workshop on the cheap! I’m always in awe at the skills they need to learn that are nonexistent in the western world.

If the thinkpad community gets behind this, there will be a market for upspecced thinkpads as long as supplies last.<p>the reduce re-use re-cycle part here is nicely inserting itself into the recycle tail side.

Even though the aim here is different, sustainability through repair and reuse is uplifting. It&#x27;s also a reminder that 10-year-old computers can do a lot and most of us may not need the latest shiny laptops.

I have a friend who runs a devices (mostly Laptops and Phones) rental business. Repairs are a key component in their business model. They have a well-established setup powered by processes automated by technology. He is a programmer, who bootstrapped his business into a successful enterprise today.<p>If you are in India (or more specifically Bangalore), check out his team <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spurge.rentals" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spurge.rentals</a><p>I remember advising him to protect his domains with a .com while using an interesting but .com domain.

I had an HP laptop bought in 2016, that worked like a charm and worked perfectly till 2023, when I upgraded to Windows 11, which wasn&#x27;t supported on it. But in Delhi&#x27;s Nehru Place, I got the damn thing repaired several times for several times, including battery repairs, a broken keyboard amongst other things, that extended its life quite well. In fact, I was open to using it for more years, though the HDD kind of sucked compared to the SSD.

This is largely a result of tariffs&#x2F;duties that India imposes on everything. A typical $800 laptop is going to cost $1200-$1500 in India. Combined with the purchasing power parity, a good laptop is out of reach for most people. The repair culture works entirely due to artificial scarcity. Nostalgia for repairs notwithstanding, it is a failure for the country that people can&#x27;t afford a decent laptop in 2025.

It seems to me that one (of many) factors contributing to the fact that electronics are no longer repaired as often in Western countries is the wealth of these countries and the relatively low cost of electronics. If an hour of a technician&#x27;s labor costs X, and a particular piece of equipment can be bought for, say, 3X, it doesn&#x27;t make much sense for most people to repair it.

&gt; “...For instance, we salvage parts from old laptop motherboards, such as capacitors, mouse pads, transistors, diodes, and certain ICs and use them in the newly refurbished ones,” says Prasad.<p>This highlights the problem of parts availability, especially for older laptops (10 years old or even older). Since no one, the original manufacturer as well as the &quot;dup(licat)ors&quot;, is going to make parts for laptops that old.<p>During my own attempt to revive my old laptops, I had to buy three different keyboards, each costs around $8, from 2 different recycling shop, to &quot;Frankenstein&quot; a working and fairly new-looking one. And then the screen bezel and palm rest is another struggle. One total revival ended up costed me around $50 and 2 weeks, and give up on another one.<p>I imagine in order for laptop&#x2F;electronic repairing to work reliably, manufactures needs to create standardized parts, like what happened to desktop PCs. But that hasn&#x27;t happened since ...ever?

The repair culture exists because there&#x27;s a market for it. People&#x27;s disposable income--or lack thereof--forces them to make do with less shiny, older, products. As society gets richer, this repair culture, too, will fade and go extinct. &quot;When I can easily afford, why should I settle?&quot;, the thinking will go.<p>What I&#x27;d like to see is for society to embrace repair culture because that feels the right thing to do. A culture where it should feel immoral to chuck something out when there&#x27;s still life left on the product. A culture where repairing makes economic sense--i.e., the cost of repair doesn&#x27;t surpass that of a new, comparable, product by a wide margin.<p>When deprecation is the norm and fashion, when companies are incentivized to &quot;innovate&quot; (read: planned obsolescence) and flood the market with cheap products, there won&#x27;t be a repair culture.

India is a classic cyberpunk dystopia. High tech penetration, extreme income inequality, prevalent hacker undergrounds (as shown in the article) and horrible quality of life.

I remember a time when I bought an used laptop and was able to upgrade the CPU, RAM and hard drive.<p>While I might buy now a laptop such as a MacBook without being able to replace major components, I will never buy a desktop such as a Mac Studio and accept the same shortcomings. And it&#x27;s not only that I want to tinker with hardware, but buying parts and assembling the desktop myself has a much better price&#x2F;performance ratio than buying of the shelf parts. Being able to upgrade is a bonus and that allows me to have cheaper upgrades than selling it and buying another one.<p>How much more would Apple tax me for a Mac with the equivalent performance of i9 14900K, Nvidia 4090, 128 GB RAM and 8 GB SSD I assembled in a few hours.<p>If I were much richer so the few hours spent on assembling the thing were more valuable than the price difference, I might have thought differently.

&gt; “We literally make them out of scrap! We also take in second-hand laptops and e-waste from countries like Dubai and China, fix them up, and sell them at half the price of a new one,” he explains.<p>This part is pretty surprising (maybe it&#x27;s only a single source saying this so it could be non-truthful), because given China&#x27;s electronics ecosystem that I would expect the repair ecosystem to be the most efficient and best there. But then maybe because the standard-of-living is higher in China that it would be cheaper to ship unrepaired electronics to India and the repair being done here, as repaired old electronics would have less value in the market in China.

One of the events in my early life that got me interested in computers was a friend from middle school who lived near a Radio Shack and a neighbourhood computer store. He dumpster dived and got every computer he owned that way. He had a couple of Macintosh computers, this was like 1992, with cracked plastics. I enjoyed just sitting there and watching him tinker. His entire bedroom was filled with stuff he liberated from dumpster diving.

Somewhat related, Gamers Nexus made a video about motherboards made from salvaged parts in Shenzhen a while ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qNje63vx73s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qNje63vx73s</a>

I&#x27;m guessing they still look like a normal laptop, which is why there&#x27;s no photo of such a &quot;Frankenstein&quot; laptop?

I grew up in a village, where literally nothing goes waste. Eevrything is recycled. You can&#x27;t think of anything that is junk. Animal poop and rotten bio-waste makes a great fertilizer for crops. Metal waste is melt by blacksmith, Wood in any form or shape is highly reusable. Plastics are almost absent, but they are sold in exchange for onions etc. Fabric is extremely reused. After reusing multiple time, things end up in a dump at the corner of own premises, which degrades and becomes fertilizer, in time for next crop.

I literally just bought a 2nd hand laptop, made by $huge_tech_conglomerate_from_pacific_northwest, with an 11-th gen i7, for less than EUR 250. The reason it was so cheap? It has a defective charging port so it only charges via USB-C. So it&#x27;s not even &quot;dead&quot; dead.<p>This is mind-boggling, the CPU alone almost basically makes the full price. In what world is this an efficient allocation of resources?

I just love it, when people repair old stuff and the things are running again for another time. I love to repair things myself, it&#x27;s just a very good feeling, if you managed to repair a device. Don&#x27;t ask how often it would be cheaper to buy a new device, but the feeling is priceless.

Part of the appeal of refurbished computers is that currently, fresh new laptops and tablets have reached a horrible minimum-quality. I have chewed myself and our household through a possibly obscene number of laptops, tablets and smartphones over the last 15 years or so. One of the villains in this story is Asus.<p>An ugly pattern emerges. In my country, there is mandatory 2year warranty on bought electronics - if it breaks before 24 months, the retailer owes you a working specimen. Well, what do you know.. I see a pattern of a lot of these items breaking before 3 years have passed. It is almost as if some hierarchy of managers have dictated &quot;can you make this thing last for 25 months, but no further than that?&quot;<p>- 1 the non-replacable battery will die, leaving the device a brick.<p>- 2 the power management IC will die, so the system refuses to light up or receive electrical current.<p>- 3 often, when (2) happens, the motherboard will be toasted as a by-product, leaving you to pay 600 DKK to have the retailer inform you &quot;we have looked at your device, unfortunately the motherboard died, so repairing it will cost you same price as brand new. Thank you for the 600 you paid to have us tell you that&quot;.<p>Within the last year, I have had two separate Asus VivoBooks die on me, both after about 24 months of use - but critically, &quot;&gt;24&quot;, so no repair&#x2F;warranty. One of them a DKK-10.000 purchase, the other a DKK-6.500 purchase. Neither of them have seen particular abuse, they were used by me, as &quot;household pets&quot; - so laptops that never left the couch.<p>I have taken a long time to learn this, but my learned lesson is that I have stopped buying these &quot;10k DKK for 24 months of laptop&quot; devices.<p>I am a pathological computer hoarder, and I have plenty of desktop PCs that are still alive and kicking after 10+ years (in which I may understandably have to replace PSUs).<p>The scam&#x2F;grift that suppliers like Asus are operating on comsumer devices, is that the PMIC is designed to fail, is soldered into the motherboard, and that they love whenever the failing PMIC kills the motherboard during its death throes.

I bought a 2016 for someone for about $150 and it was probably refurbished at such shop few months back. It had 16GB RAM and i7 processor enough to get going with design work with a nice external laptop. I wasn&#x27;t sure if it will last but took a bet and it works perfectly.

Happens a lot in China too.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hwcooling.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;recycling-in-china-laptop-cpus-turned-into-lga-1151-upgrades&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hwcooling.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;recycling-in-china-laptop-cpus-...</a>

As a suburban kid in New York in the 70s, I also got my start in tech by taking apart and sometimes repairing old radios. In my case it wasn&#x27;t a repair shop but an older sibling who encouraged my interest.

India still has a thriving repair and refurbishment culture, which was born more out of financial necessity than environmental concerns.<p>I know someone who exports automobile tires from the US to India to be retreaded.

Hell yeah! I wanna read more about this kind of stuff.

Want a real solution to electronic waste, with real international knock-on effects?<p>The EU should mandate 10-year warranties for higher-end consumer electronics and durable goods.<p>This could work on a sliding scale: less expensive items get shorter warranties (but never below the current 2-year minimum), while pricier products require longer coverage periods.<p>Such legislation would:<p>1. End the exploitation of workers in sweatshops producing deliberately short-lived products<p>2. Discourage planned obsolescence and reduce manufacturing waste<p>3. Significantly decrease the climate impact of consumer electronics<p>4. Create genuine incentives for a Circular Economy where durable products like quality ThinkPads become standard rather than exceptions<p>By requiring products to last, we&#x27;d not only protect consumers and the Environment, but also the vulnerable workers currently trapped and exploited in sweatshops designed to produce disposable goods.

In the US they&#x27;re not called repair shops, they&#x27;re chop shops - where all our stolen electronics wash up

That&#x27;s the way, India. Helping the poor and avoiding waste it&#x27;s the key point to improve the society.

I wonder if repair culture will expand in the US if prices on consumer elections rise with tariffs.

Please ask your local representatives to vote for the right to repair!

Are there any good online resources for this beyond iFixit?

Honestly cool, though it really sucks that they don&#x27;t have any safety from all those harmful chemicals.