Last weekend the worst-case scenario happened: I dropped my iPhone 3GS and the glass screen shattered.
While the phone still worked, my iPhone is my indispensable companion — I use it for internet and e-mail more than my laptop — so I didn’t want to go a day with it having a badly cracked screen.
My first stop on my repair journey was Apple.
I knew they’d want a lot to fix it, but I was shocked to learn that they wanted $200.
To put that in perspective, you can buy a new 3GS 8GB phone with contract for $50.
Apple’s justification for their exorbitant fee is that if anyone but Apple opens up the phone to do repairs, the warranty is voided. I had bought the phone over two years ago, so the warranty was expired. I had nothing to lose by fixing the phone myself, or paying someone else to do it.
A Google search of “iphone broken screen” produces a long list of third party companies that you can mail your phone to and they’ll repair it, vendors that sell do-it-yourself replacement parts/kits, and videos showing how the repair is done. After watching several videos, replacing the glass (called the digitizer) didn’t appear all that hard, but I really didn’t want to make my first attempt at it using my own phone.
The mail-away companies wanted about $70 to $80, including shipping fees, which I felt was pretty high given that repair kits sell for less than $10 including shipping. Further, I’d be without a phone for several days. This left me with the option of doing the repair myself, but as previously mentioned, I was hesitant to do this, and I also didn’t want to wait several days for the parts (the phone broke on Saturday, so nothing was going to be shipped until Monday).
In a brief moment of inspiration I decided to see what my options were on Craigslist. I did a search for “broken iphone” and found some college kid who replaced the digitizer for me that afternoon for $50 (including parts). While he likely netted over $45 for his five minutes of labor, I got same day repair, so it was hard to argue with that.
My takeaway from this experience was how effective Apple is at using the warranty to intimidate their customers.
While I suspect Apple is leaving money on the table by charging so much for the repair — clearly the burgeoning underground repair market shows how many people won’t pay the $200 — Apple wouldn’t be charging it if people weren’t paying it. So is the warranty really that good that it’s worth $200 to avoid voiding it? Of course not.
The iPhone warranty and extended AppleCare only cover manufacturing defects like a faulty chip. Any damage inflicted to the phone by the user isn’t covered. And anything that goes wrong with the phone as a result of a manufacturing defect is likely to manifest itself immediately. If you make it through the first few months, it’s unlikely that anything is ever going to go wrong. So if you’ve broken the screen after owning the phone for three months, it’s pretty irrational to avoid doing a repair yourself in fear of something eventually breaking that is covered by warranty.
Now I have to admit that I’ve fallen victim to Apple’s warranty con — I bought the AppleCare extension for my phone.
In the course of writing this, it has occurred to me that there was no option to buy an extended warranty for most of my other electronics: TV, speakers, receiver, etc. — and they all cost substantially more than my iPhone. I guess I never thought about this before because I never worried about any of them breaking — past experience has taught me that these things live very long lives. But because the Apple warranty is so easy to void, I just assumed that it must be that good without really checking the fine print.
By playing the warranty fear card so well, Apple may be undermining the perceived value of its products.
They continue to get flack because you cannot do basic things like swap out a battery. Well, actually you can. If you’re willing to put aside warranty fear, self-repairs are really rather simple. There’s a surprising lack of vision on Apple’s part to figure out a way to sell parts (at an inflated price) so people can do their own repairs while continuing to convince people to buy worthless extended warranty plans.
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