Post #2075657

2026-05-04 15:32 UTC

@aoanla How hard/expensive would it be to make phones that mimic the structure of a desktop computer or even a laptop? So that when things break, you don't lose the entire hardware but (say) only fix whatever the damage is or at worst move the processor and everything else onto a new motherboard? It's just... I know phones are cheap and intended to be largely disposable, but it seems terribly wasteful to incapacitate the entire phone just because of a software issue.

Replies (2)

@aoanla@hachyderm.io 2026-05-04 16:04

@oddtail well, a reasonable way to estimate is to look at a phone designed to do much of that already - the Fairphone series are designed to be modular and repairable... but even they have the main storage, memory and CPU soldered to the mainboard to make things light and thin (as, increasingly, laptops do) https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6

Open ##2075658
@bhtooefr@snack.social 2026-05-04 16:15

@oddtail @aoanla so in the case of a software issue bricking the phone, that's often because of the phone only having eMMC or UFS storage, and not a separate chip for the firmware but you can do the same thing to a desktop or laptop with a bad BIOS update, it's just on a phone, the bootloader (the equivalent of the BIOS) is stored on the same flash chip as everything else. (also some low-end laptops nowadays do the same thing!) however, they have to get the bootloader on there for the first time at the factory, and there's usually a first-stage bootloader in non-writable ROM on the CPU that's used for that. the old-school way of unbricking when the bootloader was corrupt was to use a JTAG debug interface to directly access the hardware to flash a good bootloader. the new-school way is to use USB Device Firmware Update - the first stage bootloader will let the thing show up over USB and accept a good firmware image.

Open ##2075659