About Aaron
I’m Aaron, the founder and lead technician of iBoard Repair. For over a decade, I’ve specialized in advanced iPhone data recovery and motherboard microsoldering, recovering data from devices that many shops consider unrecoverable. This page explains how I built that diagnostic foundation, why I approach motherboard repair the way I do, and how that path shaped the lab.
Founder & Lead Technician
The Beginning
I got my start in consumer electronics at Best Buy in high school around 2007. That environment taught me early how to understand what customers were actually asking for, communicate clearly, and recommend the best solution for their needs.
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.
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.
Starting Microsoldering
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
Forged in the "Golden Era" of Logic Board Repair
At the same time, the common faults of that era gave me the kind of physical repetition that is hard to get any other way. 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.
Each generation demanded a little more precision than the last. On the 5s, the repair centered around a single chip in a non-risky location on the board. On the 6 Plus, touch disease added jumper work in addition to a chip replacement—along with closer proximity to the delicate CPU. On the iPhone 7, audio IC pushed that further. It had one chip and multiple jumper wires that had to be placed correctly for the repair to hold, all with the sensitive baseband CPU directly opposite the board. When overheated, it would automatically kill LTE service to the device. That progression gave me exactly what a young board technician needs most: each new iPhone demanding a little more precision and a little less room for error.
That repetition also did not happen by accident. When I lived in Orange County, I went shop to shop telling repair businesses that these motherboard faults were real, that they were going to see them, and that there were specific symptoms that could help them recognize what they had in front of them. I told them that when they ran into one of those cases and did not know what to do next, they could call me, and I left a card. Over time, those calls started coming in consistently. Before long, I had daily iPhone motherboard repair work.
The common faults of that era gave me repetition in physical repair. Water damage gave me practice in how to think.
The Great Equalizer
Then the iPhone X arrived, and the trade changed.
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. You had to learn how to control heat in a way that would not damage chips nearby your work, which were moving closer and closer together with each generation.
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.
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.
Breaking through to CPU-Level Recovery
All of that repetition gave me better hands and a sharper mind, but eventually I started running into snapped boards and other severe physical damage cases that normal troubleshooting could not solve.
CPU work took time to truly understand. I had to learn what the board should look like electrically at each stage of the process: which current draw patterns meant it was still alive, and which combinations of installed or missing chips would still allow DFU, recovery, or normal boot. The real shift came when I stopped treating CPU work as a difficult physical procedure and started learning how to read the board while the work was still in progress.
After enough failures, enough successful swaps, and enough measurement with different chip combinations, I started to recognize what each stage was supposed to look like. Instead of waiting until the end of a 2–4 hour process to discover something had gone wrong at the beginning, I could verify each step as I went. CPU work stopped being a blind sequence of physical steps and became a process I could check, confirm, and control along the way.
That understanding is a big part of why I am cautious about CPU work now. It is not a shortcut. It is one of the highest-risk procedures in iPhone data recovery, and it only makes sense when the case truly calls for it. At that level, there is often nothing further to fall back on. If the diagnosis is wrong or the execution is poor, the path to recovery can be permanently destroyed.
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, the procedure should have succeeded. When it does not, the case often becomes far 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 or 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.
Severe Cases, Advanced Recovery, and Industry Respect
Over the last decade, my bench life has been overwhelmingly focused on iPhone motherboards. Not hard drives. Not basic phone repair. Not a mix of everything that comes through a shop. iPhone motherboards, every day. Because of that, 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.
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.
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
When your data is important, the margin for error is small. Important chips can be permanently damaged by shops that do not specialize in microsoldering and board-level data recovery. You do not want someone “trying their best” on a procedure they rarely perform. You want someone who understands the risks, knows when a method is appropriate, and can carry it out without destroying the path to the data.
When you contact iBoard Repair, you are not calling a general repair shop that outsources difficult cases or a large recovery company acting as a middleman. You are working directly with the owner and technician performing the board-level recovery on your device.