Comment by GianFabien
7 days ago
It has become increasingly difficult to repair electronics. The components have become ever smaller and with higher levels of integration. You need access to schematics for the products and datasheets for the components. Of course, you also need sufficient knowledge to use that information. Then there is the issue of sourcing replacement components. If you lack any of the foregoing, then you will have to reverse-engineer the circuits and that is very difficult with multi-layer PCBs.
For any product with microcontrollers, you might be able to locate JTAG connections and use that to debug some of the functionality. But that area requires even greater amount of knowledge and experience.
You're not wrong. But still, a lot of gadgets can be repaired with some knowledge and effort, even if you don't have a schematic. If one just knows, for example, that very many faults are power supply related, and knows that problems with capacitors and transistors are responsible for a lot of power supply problems, you can accomplish quite a bit.
But yes, if you are talking about replacing BGA packaged high-end chips in very complex devices, there's a threshold were it becomes very difficult. But even then, if we watch some of what the different folks on Youtube accomplish repairing smartphones, laptops, etc., we'll see that some of these guys can achieve some pretty impressive results even without fancy labs and complete schematics, etc. Not everything is repairable of course, but I don't think pursuing this path is exactly "tilting at windmills" either.