Those e-markets are filled with adjacent buildings where the market spills over, so it very well could be near but in a building that has an Adidas store.
The glory days of the e-markets are almost over though, the one in Zhongguancun is much smaller than it used to be, but you still need to know the right building to go into to get your old X-box or Wii unlocked.
So as I understand it, all of the "parts" are mostly worthless because they wont just work in another iPhone.
How do you maintain this functionality and give the "right to repair"? I would assume that it's possible but would add a fair bit of cost to devices (not that someone like apple cant bear said costs)... But IM just guessing on that front as I have zero experience with hardware locking.
Most parts will indeed work. It will just show "unkown part" in the settings. The main thing that is really paired is the front camera for faceID. Also changing the screen without the original paired chip makes you lose autobrightness and truetone which is need to get to MAX brightness on 14 and up.
The high value parts are locked down so yeah the options for stripping iphones have become more limited & thus backyard iphone recycling operations decreased.
Unsure whether anyone has found a way past the apple locks...not to my knowledge.
>cost
I don't think cost even factors into any of this at apple margins. What does is that repairability affects things that matter to the consumer: Size, weight, thinness, feel, lack of exposed screws etc. Compromising on repairability makes all those easier
It's roughly a subway stop east of it - the hotel I stay at when I visit is almost at the exact point on that map - but remember that Chinese maps and GPS do not line up (check that spot on google maps and then turn on the photo layer you'll see that the streets don't line up) - the actual spot looks like the mall even further east.
Huaqiangbei is legit (and a wonder!) - the spot that would be a real smoking gun is the Huaken Building (aka the "Dodgy Cellphone Market") which is south of Shennan Middle Rd and between the spot on the map and Huaqiangbei. That place is pretty amazing in its own right, at the east end people sell bits of phones, dead phones, 'recycled' phones - they are torn down into parts which are reassembled onto new PCBs and resold at the west end of the building - it's full of lots of little cubes, people each doing a part of the process and onselling their work product to the next person - if you ever thought your phone can't be worked on by hand, can't be fixed, you are so wrong, these are real professionals - they take junk and make it real again.
If the phones were simply being recycled it would be wonderfully OK, even if Apple hates the idea of this sort of grey market, they'd rather we threw them away so they can sell new ones. As I understand it many of the Apple chips these days are 'paired' at the factory, you can't just replace one (and they have to pass through the above process together as a unit) this may mean (I'm completely guessing here) that they're still screwed if the user wont erase their phone, even if they completely remake it
There is so much hands on knowledge that I wish was better documented. Louis Rossmann is great but there are a lot more non Apple devices out there that sometimes seem impossible to repair unless you really know things at a circuit level.
I've seen instruction pamphlets for these guys that measure the current draw as a particular iPhone model boots, from that they show places in the boot process where particular chips fail and how it changes
Remember they are removing chips from old boards, reballing them and soldering them onto new ones - they can pull a chip, fix a short and drop it back down pretty easily
lol no.
That location is the Huaqiangbei electronics market - one of the largest electronics markets in the world w/ a thriving 2nd hand parts ecosystem.