Laptops have become thinner, lighter, faster and their screens more brilliant than ever before. However, packing all this technology in an increasingly shrinking form factor has made it increasingly difficult to repair when the time comes. Unlike with laptops that were sold a few years ago, today the latest Ultrabooks are a lot thinner but also a lot more difficult to disassemble and have few replaceable and repairable parts. Laptops that can be repaired can only be repaired by a certified PC repair technician who has been especially trained to carry out laptop repairs of these kinds.
Here are 5 reasons repairing the latest laptops have become increasingly expensive:
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- The use of proprietary components: This is one of the leading reasons why repairing laptops have become expensive. In order to keep things light and small many manufacturers have to make custom components that are only standardized for their particular product. So, when one laptop is replaced with a new model it can be near impossible to find replacement parts. There are some manufacturers that do not even have replacement parts for their own laptops so it’s up to the laptop repair technician to figure out an alternative repair method or simply declare it unrepairable. Either way it’s expensive!
- More integrated circuits: Integrated circuits happen to be the leading reason why the size of consumer electronics is shrinking almost every day. However, the biggest drawback of ICs as they are commonly referred to as is the fact that they do not have screws or hinges that can be lifted in order to open them up and replace faulty parts. When an IC blows it needs to be replaced but finding a replacement is not easy. 80% of the ICs used in laptops today cannot be purchased by a regular repair centre and those that can are very expensive. This adds additional overhead to any repair job. Some smart laptop repair engineers will improvise but often times these choices will mean that the laptop does not last very long. The alternative of course will be to send the laptop back to the manufacturer for repairs if it’s still under warranty.
- The latest components are not designed to be repaired: Let’s face it – even though Apple’s Retina display may look good, but even a brilliant authorized laptop repair technician cannot take one apart and fix the lighting or a malfunctioning panel. The reason being that in order to ensure that the Retina display looks brilliant and to hide the proprietary technology contained within it, Apple and other similar manufactures have decided to seal everything inside. There are no screws or hinges that technicians can undo to take the display apart. So, the only way a technician can fix a failing MacBook Air display is to find a replacement retina display which often costs hundreds of dollars, and is often sold by someone whose laptop has failed but the display is still good and is trying to recover some of his investment by selling the display. This makes the repair process both difficult and expensive from a consumer’s stand point.
- The price of connecting wires and boards have risen steadily: Things like the keyboard connector, the screen connection cable etc., seem to all vary from one manufacturer to the next. There some that only use a specific type of connector which is not interchangeable with those of other laptops. So, when these wires fail an otherwise cheap fix of simply replacing a wire by a technician can often become expensive owing to the rising cost of these wires. Since the screen’s cable is the most commonly failing item in 90% of laptops the price of this repair varies widely but happens to be the most expensive for laptops with high resolution displays.
- Fault detection takes hours: While components were larger in the past they made detection of failure points easier. Today according to experts shrinking components have made it increasingly difficult to find failure points. Laptop repairs that once took an hour or two now can end up taking the whole day. Also, literally hundreds of screws, adhesive and tape used in laptops makes the process even more cumbersome and so these are repairs can only be handled by experts.
