Have you made money by buying broken tech, fixing it and re-selling it?

Have you made money by buying broken tech, fixing it and re-selling it?

Back in the late 90's when I was in college I did. These days there isn't a whole lot of coin to be made that way aside from servicing a niche market. You might be able to make some good money refurbing certain thinkpads and librebooting them, for example, but just fixing up for parts shit these days is tight as fuck due to all the chinks in on the business already.

im slowly getting into synth refurbishing but finds are rare and buyers of rebuilt kit dont want to pay top dollar for obvious reasons

yep

Anyone ever had the experience that you buy something online for a good price and then the next day after it arrived you look again and it costs even less, so that you instantly lost a lot of money?

Happened to me quite a few times.

No im the goddamn free family IT guy

And i suck

Then return it and buy it again?

That and warranty are the big killers.
You have to get your stuff free or, better yet, bet paid to take it.
Then some hidden bug comes out of nowhere and your sale costs you a heap of time and money, not to mention credibility.

You obviously haven't looked into the iPhone screen repair business

I take old PCs from the e-waste center nearby and sell them on eBay. Anything older than a Pentium 2 sells for at least $50 regardless of condition. My only question is who the fuck is buying these things when DOSBox exists.

Often the opposite happens for me. Buy something and it sells out or something and the price goes up. For example i bought a 4gb ram c720 Chromebook on ebay for 45$ from a school or something a year ago. Now they are atleast 70-80 even in broken condition

>iPhone screen repair business
If you get your iPhone display fixed anywhere but with Apple or an Authorized Repairer you'll probably wind up with a non-Retina display.

Its literally what I do for a living. I own an entire business built around repairs and refurbishing . . . everything from laptops and desktops to enterprise servers and UPS units.

Very old computers have a good amount of gold in them, people buy them on eBay for recovery purposes. Often they pay more than the gold itself is actually worth due to speculation.

when i was a kid I found old hardware on the side of the road during hard rubbish collection, and went to cash converters (pawn shop) and they gave me $10. I remember them taking an old apple ps2 mouse, cant remember the rest

I then bought a $15 256mb micro sd card for my moto v3x, fun times.

Yes. Bought a "broken" PS3 for $25 which had an iffy drive. Rebuilt the drive and unstuck the gears and sold it to a friend for $120.

>ripping off friends
>"a friend"

I wanna do it with phones. I live in a third world country and used phones sell very fast here.
However I have no idea how to fix them

If you shop at Amazon, they will match any price drop 7 days after the item is delivered.

I think I've got $10 back on a few items. I also like to keep items I'd like to buy in my cart and watch prices fluctuate. I paid $20 for a $35 book and it went back to $35 12 hours later. CamelCamelCamel is a great site to compare price fluctuations.

I try to fix it instead.

Had a 50" TV I tried to repair, but it was gone. Capacitors were blown and it wouldn't turn on. But the main problem was the screen and it would have cost $100-$700 for the replacement. I guess it was recalled or something years before.

kthx

There are some good videos on YouTube where people show how to repair various phones.

Short of desoldering and replacing broken USB/charge ports everything on a phone is just component replacement. iFixit has excellent tutorials for nearly every model.

No fixing a broken panel!

He's just talking about replacing the shattered glass. Not the panel itself.

no, but I've made money finding stuff left in lecture halls and selling it on Craigslist

I'm not a thief, just a vulture.. I've returned multiple iPhones and Macbooks, I usually just keep the smaller shit, eg bluetooth headphones, cheap laptops

Made a fair amount of cash fixing cruising thrift shops for receivers, computers and cameras/lenses. Most of the time they would be in OK condition and just needed a bit of elbow grease to really polish up. Receivers and computers were the easiest, they usually functioned and at worst would need only a few dollars in parts. The lenses were the toughest because people just handle them poorly and scratch them, fungus I can deal with by just taking it apart but scratched glass is pretty much done.

The problem is I live in Canada so ebay shipping was retarded. The shipping cost + insurance for a tracked package is basically highway robbery and scares away US buyers even with our shit dollar. So I had to resort to Kijiji (canadian craigslist) and there's SO MANY fucking indians/morons/shysters it makes your head spin. Seriously you should have to submit a colour sample of your skin before you're permitted to use that site because poo-in-loos fucking invaded and destroyed that place. Such is life in canada.

>2016
>hardware repair
no
way too late for general repair market

I've found a number of cheap chinese phones while bike around, open them up, pull out the micro sd card, see what's on it and sell it to friends

That's pretty creepy

if that's the case you didn't do your research

Kek

I went to that store before

who here // long island //

Not worth it unless you can get the broken tech for very cheap

If you're fighting for less than $50 or even $100 of profit then it's not worth it

No most shit that goes dead today is unfixable...

I did before where one leaky capacitor or something would be a problem...

>You obviously haven't looked into the iPhone screen repair business
There hasn't been one since before iPhone 4. Buying a replacement screen costs more than actually paying Apple to do it now. You used to be able to get them for like $30. Not so today.

I found a 60 inch HD RPTV on the side of the road and fixed it by replacing a couple capacitors. Not one of the really old ones, but the last ones made before flatscreen took over. So it looks fine, it's just big and heavy.

But it turns out it won't sell for jack shit so it's just sitting in my room. Kind of regret doing it really. I can only get like $20 for it tops but I feel like tossing it is just a waste.

For the LCD itself yes

For just glass repair it's like $25 for a kit still while Apple does it for like $129

I've made like $50-75 total
might make a bit more since I got a pretty much perfect laptop for dirt cheap, and I already had the parts for it.
although I did make $700 by fixing, then selling my friends old macbook pro.
He bought all the parts, but it took forever to get them, so by the time I got it done he had a new laptop that he liked better.

Quite a few years ago I would buy broken xbox 360's for no more than £30 and either reballing the GPU or replacing the laser would fix 90% of the problems, I would then install a couple of diodes and write Xell to the NAND and sell for £200.

Easy money.

How much was your reballing setup?
I imagine that ship has sailed but i often considered getting one to fix all those fucked up xboxs i happened upon, taking the lead out of the solder really fucked it.
You know those older 360s are designed to run at 80'C as normal, disgusting! Don't even get me started on the ps3s with their fucking turbines and the heatspreader you need to melt off to repalce the shit paste above and below.

My first setup was around £300 I think but later replaced it with an automated ACHI setup which cost over a grand but was well worth it as I was making easy money and it did most of the work for me.
I then started reballing business kiosks and some other business class motherboards for a large multinational but in the end the profit just dried up and I went into networking.
It was fun while it lasted.