Three others are from the military, where they recover evidence from phones involved in criminal cases. Three of them already do “parts-level” work, replacing screens, batteries, and the like, and want to offer deeper repairs and data recovery. Most of the other eight people in this week’s course have flown in-from Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina-save one from Rochester. It’s a drab, gray, one-and-a-half hour drive on the Thruway for me from Buffalo, through the leafless trees of early February. The village has 2,800 residents, five main roads, and one Walgreens. Honeoye Falls is a 20-minute drive from Rochester in upstate New York. There are almost certainly more circuit boards inside iPad Rehab then there are people in the town where it operates. Each one of those bits with silver on its sides is a component that could fail-and be fixed. Think Like a Physician, Not an Engineer iPhone board with a chip removed, and a fingernail for scale.

Next week I’ll dive into the work of repairing all those faults, and after that, the business and politics of microsoldering and board repair. This post will detail the major lessons I learned about how phones fail on an internal level, and how to diagnose them. What follows is part one of a three-part diary of my week at “board school.” It won’t be strictly chronological, because there’s both repetition and backtracking in learning. But a lot more of these things could be fixed than we’re fixing now. Not every phone can be fixed, nor is the effort or time worth it to everyone. We can fix these things-even I can fix these things, a writer whose last real electrical training was the Science Olympiad in 7th grade. When the electricity can’t go where it needs to, you can find out where it’s blocked, and make it flow again. The logic board inside a smartphone (or tablet, or laptop, or any gadget) is a grid of flowing electrical channels. This was not something only gigantic companies can do. But fixing that iPhone board made it all click-this was not something only gigantic companies can do.

Replacing the Tristar chip on an iPhone board wasn’t the hardest thing I did at Jessa Jones’ week-long microsoldering and board repair class. A Tristar Tester confirming a successful charging chip replacement.

Apple board view files