About Aaron

Founder & Lead Technician

The Foundation

I got my start in consumer electronics while working at Best Buy in high school around 2007. At the time, the company put a heavy emphasis on training, performance, and customer service. That environment taught me a lot early on: how to understand what a customer was actually asking for, how to communicate professionally, and how to present the best solution based on their needs.

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I also found out pretty quickly that I was highly competitive. I pushed myself to win the daily ranking systems and eventually became one of the top salespeople in the computer and tablet departments. Ironically, when I started there, I still had a flip phone. My first real smartphone came later, after strong sales performance earned me a free Samsung Galaxy S4. That period gave me a strong foundation in communication, professionalism, and customer trust that still shapes how I run iBoard Repair today.

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How Repair Took Over

After several years, I moved to Verizon. That was where I started seeing large numbers of broken iPhones up close for the first time, and it sparked my interest in fixing them. I bought my first repair toolkit while there. I was originally planning to buy a $2 toolkit until my boss suggested I "splurge" on the better $12 iCracked drivers. To this day, the flathead screwdriver that came with that kit is still getting daily use.

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It did not take long for me to realize that I enjoyed fixing phones more than selling them. Eventually I moved into a cell phone repair shop, where the technical side of my career really began. I started with basic parts replacement, but before long I kept running into devices that did not respond to normal repair methods. I wanted to understand why.

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Forged in the "Golden Era" of Logic Board Repair

That curiosity pushed me deeper into motherboard repair at a time when very little was openly taught. I found some of Jessa Jones’ early videos and eventually discovered the online technician communities where real motherboard repair knowledge was being shared.

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One lucky break in those years was meeting a retired old-school electrical engineer. He taught me the fundamentals: what a capacitor actually does, how to interpret continuity and ground on an iPhone board, how filters differ from capacitors, and how to think about circuits in a more structured way.

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I also came into the industry at an ideal time to build real technical depth. The iPhone 5s era brought the U2 charging IC crisis. Then came iPhone 6 Plus touch disease. Then iPhone 7 audio IC failure. At the time, each of these faults was challenging. Looking back now, they were the perfect training ground. They gave me repetition in diagnosis, board behavior, and microsoldering control in a very focused way.

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But one of the biggest advantages I had while learning motherboard repair was the environment I learned in. Instead of practicing on customer phones, I bought water-damaged iPhones from eBay, OfferUp, and Craigslist and worked through them on my own time. I would figure out why they would not turn on, repair them if I could, and resell the successful ones to fund the next batch. If one could not be saved, I absorbed the loss and treated it as part of the cost of learning.

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Looking back, I think that was one of the best and most responsible ways I could have entered motherboard repair. There was no customer waiting on an update, no pressure to protect a shop’s reputation, and no need to force a result on a deadline. If I got frustrated or hit a wall, I could step away, come back later with a fresh mind, and keep working the problem until I understood it. That kind of low-pressure environment gave me room to build real diagnostic ability instead of just chasing quick answers.

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It also shaped the way I think about motherboard repair to this day. Water damage is rarely a single-issue problem. It forces you to look at the phone as a whole system, assume there may be hidden corrosion anywhere, and verify each stage instead of jumping to conclusions. That process pushed me to develop a more structured understanding of how the power sequence works and how to check each step methodically. The common faults of that era gave me repetition in physical repair. Water damage gave me practice in how to think.

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I purchased new equipment piece by piece, reinvesting the profits from each phone I fixed back into the business. That not only allowed me to keep up with the technical demands of the trade, but also helped me understand, deeply and personally, the value of every tool I use.

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That era gave technicians like me a major advantage. We were able to build our knowledge layer by layer, one major failure type at a time, as each generation of iPhone evolved.

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The Great Equalizer

Then the iPhone X arrived, and the trade changed.

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Until that point, technicians could often build their skills around common recurring faults on single-layer boards. The iPhone X introduced a new level of difficulty. Many of the same diagnostic challenges still existed, but now the board itself had to be split to access the internal layers. To complete even routine repairs, you often had to separate the sandwich board, fix the fault, reball the interposer layers, and reassemble everything successfully.

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In the early days, there were no proper testing jigs. This was new territory for the entire industry. It was a moment that forced technicians to adapt or fall behind.

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A lot of board repair technicians dropped out during that era. The work had become dramatically less forgiving. It demanded stronger physical control, better process discipline, and a deeper understanding of how the board behaved before, during, and after separation.

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But that challenge also became the next stage of my development. Repeating interposer work over and over built the precision and confidence that later made true CPU-level work possible. That transition did not come from skipping the fundamentals. It came from being forced to master a harder intermediate stage first.

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That matters, because CPU work should never be treated as a shortcut or a universal answer. It is one of the highest-risk procedures in iPhone data recovery. Once you are at that level, there is often nothing further to fall back on. If the diagnosis is wrong or the execution is poor, the mistake can permanently block the pathway to recovery.

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I see that risk most clearly in second-opinion cases after a failed CPU attempt. If the original chips were healthy enough for that path to work, then the procedure should have succeeded. When it does not, the case often becomes much more dangerous. In those situations, I am left hoping the previous attempt failed because of poor execution, but not so badly that the chip surfaces, pads, or surrounding board structure were permanently damaged. That is why CPU work has to be approached with restraint, discipline, and a clear reason for doing it in the first place.​

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I was fortunate to grow alongside each stage of iPhone motherboard complexity. That progression—from common fault repair, to water damage diagnosis, to interposer work, and only then to CPU-level procedures—helped build the deeper and more durable foundation my work stands on today.

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Obsession With Precision

Beyond technical skill, I think obsession with the work is what really sets me apart. Every new iPhone model brings new challenges that require both a sharp mind and a steady hand. I often find myself thinking through complex cases long into the night and again as soon as I wake.

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That mindset is beneficial because the stakes are real. My customers are trusting me with irreplaceable photos, videos, messages, and business data. A motherboard can be permanently damaged by a careless technician. That is why I approach every case with focus, patience, and respect for how fragile the process really is.

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Severe Cases, Advanced Recovery, and Industry Respect

Over the last decade, my focus narrowed to the cases other shops walk away from: catastrophic water damage, snapped logic boards, failed prior repair attempts, CPU and NAND transfers, and advanced RAM rework.

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There is a reason for that specialization. Some companies may process more total devices, but that work is often spread across multiple technicians and many categories of repair. My bench life has been overwhelmingly focused on iPhone motherboards for more than a decade. Not hard drives. Not basic phone repair. Not a mix of everything that comes through a shop. iPhone motherboards, every day. I do not know many individual technicians in the country who have been able to dedicate that much time to this work that specifically. Some teach. Some create content. Some divide their time across Samsung, hard drives, or general repair. Very few have been able to focus this narrowly, for this long, on iPhone motherboard data recovery.

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So I regularly take on the jobs that other data recovery labs and board-level techs decline. Well-known names in the repair industry refer customers to me when they run into a case they cannot complete in-house.

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That technical gap in the industry is the entire reason my YouTube channel exists. Those 20,000+ subscribers aren't just casual viewers—they are thousands of other repair shop owners and data lab technicians. I upload unedited, long-form videos of my bench work because the repair industry uses my channel as a classroom. While my clients watch the videos to verify the care their device will receive, other technicians are watching to learn the advanced, high-skilled microsoldering techniques.
 

Direct, Specialized, and Personally Handled

If your data is important, it cannot be overstated how easily ruined important data chips are by repair shops who do not specialize in microsoldering. If a repair shop uses wording like "it is a 50/50 chance" or "I can try and see...", then you don't want them to just give it their best shot. You want a professional who will not damage your data. If they "need to order tools" or parts, that is a sign that this might be their first time attempting the particular problem. You do not want to risk full data loss with someone who usually fixes screens all day or usually works on disk drives all day. I work on iPhones every day of the year.

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When you contact iBoard Repair, you are not calling a general repair shop that outsources difficult work or hard drive company who is only the middle man. You are working directly with the owner and technician performing the board-level recovery.​​