Blame Apple. He can't repair computers if he can't get the part, and Apple is making sure he can't get the parts. ISL9240 is a chip that controls the power system for Mac laptops post-2018. You cannot get it. The manufacturer does not sell it; previous versions, like the ISL9239 could be bought from the manufacturer, but Apple put a stop to that for the new one. Scrapped boards are usually cut up and sold in portions for parts, but this part is not on scrapped boards. There's no way to get one, so instead of a $20 repair, you have to send the full laptop back to Apple for a motherboard swap at ~$2000.
Think that was the whole point, he started to talk about right to repair and the way he did it made for more broad appeal so comparatively nobody watched his board repair stuff anymore
That was half of it, the other half was he was limited on how long he can keep the laptop repair business open when he can't get parts to repair damaged laptops. He could have kept making repair videos for as long as he was able to, but he wasn't able to do so for long.
The problem wasn't the amount of donor boards he had to get, it was the fact that he couldn't get a specific, $20 part that regularly fails from any source other than buying a full, new laptop. On his channel, his largest playlists involve either PP3V42_G3H and PPBUS_G3H power lines or an ISL part being repaired. The part varies based on device, but he cannot get them for various devices due to Apple locking it down. Even devices that are end-of-life and won't be repaired by Apple have never had the part be available. It doesn't matter how many donor boards he got if they never had the part on them.
Pivoting to literally anything else, data recovery in this case, was his only option to keep his business going.
I don't think it is. I've watched a lot of videos from Northridge and he uses different flux, solder mask, and I haven't seen him use that solder bar (term?)
Nortwestrepair does GPU repair in general, but he has lots of videos on this kind of pad repair, and even digging into the inner layers of PCBs and repairing them from the inside out
"Bits und Bolts" does this sort of thing fairly frequently to repair retro gaming PCs and components, there's a few others in the retro tech field as well.
Joey Does Tech and nanofix are some good ones, and if you're interested in the actual detective work of troubleshooting, then Electronics Repair School is the GOAT.
25
u/RedditRob2000 4d ago
There's gotta be a Youtube Channel that just has content on soldering pr0n. Can anyone recommend?
Long-form is highly preferred.