Countless companies and industries enjoy making up scary stories when it comes to justifying their opposition to making it easier to repair your own tech. Apple claims that empowering consumers and bolstering independent repair shops will turn states into “hacker meccas.” The car industry insists that making it easier and cheaper to repair modern cars will be a boon to sexual predators.
Yum-cha?
Lifted and corrupted from Chinese, broadly: commodity made-in-China parts, gadgets, or other tat that’s all largely interchangeable and cheap. Brandless or with a functionally meaningless non-brand label. The type of stuff you used to get from Chinatown, but these days you’re more likely to get from Amazon, eBay, or Aliexpress.
(“Yum cha” could be less idiomatically translated from Cantonese as “drink tea,” more broadly to “go to the dim sum place,” or later even more broadly than that, “straight from Chinatown.”)
See also.