You can build anything in Shenzhen from the screws up. It’s Silicon Valley’s go-to hardware garage. Chips, circuit boards, sensors, casings, cameras, even raw plastics and metals — it’s all here.
Read more: Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of hardware
And if you want to prototype a new product, Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronics market is the place to come. I’d heard that you could build a whole iPhone from scratch there, and I wanted to try. Huaqiangbei is a bustling downtown bazaar: crowded streets, neon lights, sidewalk vendors and chain smokers.
My fixer Wang and I wander into SEG Electronics Plaza, a series of gadget markets surrounding a towering ten-story Best-Buy-on-acid on Huaqiangbei Road. Drones whir, high-end gaming consoles flash, and customers inspect cases of chips. Someone bumbles by on a Hoverboard. A couple shops over, a cluster of kiosks hock knockoff smartphones at deep discount. One saleswoman tries to sell me on an iPhone 6 that’s running Google’s Android operating system. Another pitches a shiny Huawei phone for about 20 dollars.
I head for a stall manned by a young, shy-looking repairman at work on a gutted iPhone using just a screwdriver and his fingernails, each of which are approximately the length of a guitar pick. I ask him if he knows where to get spare iPhone parts. Without looking up, he nods.
“Can you build me one?”
“Yes,” he says. “I think so. But what do you want?” I tell him my model would do; I’m mostly interested in seeing the process.
“It’d be easier to buy the whole thing used,” he says. I tell him I’d like to start with the most basic components we can — can we buy the camera sensors, the battery, the boards and so on individually and put it together, bit by bit? He nods again. He can make me a 4s for 350 renminbi, he says. That’s about 50 dollars. And it’d work?
“Of course,” he says. I ask if I can record the process, take some photos and video. He calls me crazy, and then, with a hint of trepidation, says sure. He’ll throw in a SIM card. Deal, I say. Without warning, he stands up and takes off. He’s cruising — out to the street onto Huaqiangbei Market Road, below an underpass, up across the street, past an upscale-looking McDonald’s, down a side street, and into a giant shop space, the insides of which look like an iPhone factory has thrown up all over itself.
In downtown Shenzhen, a couple blocks from the famed electronics market, this smoky four-story building the size of a suburban minimall is an emporium for refurbished, reused and black-market iPhones. You have to see it to believe it. I’ve never seen so many iPhones in one place — not at an Apple Store, not raised by the crowd at a rock concert, not at the Consumer Electronic Show. This is just piles and piles of iPhones of every colour, model and stripe. Some booths are tricked-out repair stalls where young men and women examine iPhones with magnifying lenses and disassemble them with an array of tiny tools. There are entire stalls filled with what must be thousands of little camera lenses. Others advertise custom casings — I’d come back later and buy, for about ten dollars, a “Limited Edition, 1/250, 24 carat gold” iPhone 5 back, complete with the screws I’d need to assemble it. Another table has a huge pile of silver bitten-Apple logos that a man is separating and meting out. And it’s packed full of shoppers, buyers, repair people, all talking and smoking and poring over iPhone paraphernalia.
Our new friend doesn’t waste time. He swings by a stall filled with Apple logoed batteries and buys one for 15 renminbi, about two dollars, and bounds onward. We follow him from stall to stall, watching as he snags a camera module, a black casing, a glass display. We go to a booth with three young women sitting behind it, each staring into their own phones. One wears a white T-shirt with cash printed on it in block letters. He points to the motherboards below — “That’s the whole board,” he says. It really is true, you could buy every piece of every going iPhone here.
But I agree to expedite the process and buy a fully stocked iPhone 4s motherboard instead of all the component parts, mostly because he looks a little nervous as I snap photos. Jumble of iPhone innards in hand, we make our exit back to his repair desk at SEG Plaza. He spreads the parts out and sets to work, cradling the device’s body in his long fingernails, inserting the battery and the board, and screwing them into place with a custom screwdriver.
Jack, as he tells us to call him, is from a small town near Guiyu, a city built on taking electronics apart. He’d taught himself to repair electronics when he was young, at first as a hobby, just for himself. Then he started to do it for work, and when he moved to Shenzhen, with its massive gadget economy, repairing handsets and tablets made for a good fit.
It’s incredible to watch him work — I’d seen the repair pros at iFixit tackle a gadget, and they were impressive. But Jack uses mostly a screwdriver and his bare hands. He is nimble, intuitive and assured. He assembles the iPhone and all of its components and tests it in about 15 minutes, and then he hands me my brand-newish, only slightly scuffed iPhone 4s, complete with a SIM card that will let me make calls in China. It feels a little slow next to the 6 I’d been using; otherwise, it works perfectly well.
We celebrate, of course, with a selfie. New iPhone in hand, we head back.
This extract was taken from The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
