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Stopped by the old computer repair shop on Main Street and the whole front is a phone case kiosk now.
The owner said he closed up in 2020 because nobody brought in desktops for repair anymore, just disposable laptops. Has anyone else seen their local tech spots vanish?
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jason_lewis36mo ago
That part about "disposable laptops" hits hard. Was it mostly big box store brands he was seeing come in, or did people just stop fixing anything that wasn't a phone?
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murray.jana6mo ago
My uncle ran a repair shop until 2020. He told me the real issue was cheap parts being glued together, not just the brand. Jason_lewis3 has a point about big box models, but even mid-range ones became a nightmare to open without breaking something. People wanted things fixed, but the labor cost to carefully take apart a sealed unit often matched a new cheap laptop. It created this cycle where repair shops had to turn away work that wasn't worth the hassle. So yeah, it got serious for the small shops trying to stay open.
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betty_kelly96mo ago
Saw it firsthand helping a friend's shop. The real killers were those slim all-in-one models, the ones where the keyboard is part of the body. You'd need a heat gun and five different plastic pry tools just to peek at the RAM, and half the time a clip would snap. Customers balked at paying an hour of labor for us to maybe, possibly, get it open without making it worse. We started turning away anything that wasn't a standard, screw-together business laptop because the risk was too high.
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the_tyler6mo ago
It's the same story with appliances and even some cars now, everything's built to be replaced.
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