as an infamous butterfingers i have dropped my fair share of phones i
present exhibit a my iphone 6 that regrettably succumbed to that most cruel
of mistresses gravity fortunately apple has the solution for
the low low price of just 49 us dollars
they will ship the genius bar to you allowing you to do your very own iphone
repairs from the comfort of your home that's right the kit in front of me
includes everything i need to replace a broken screen dead battery and more
thank you apple from the bottom of my heart you are truly gracious and
benevolent as usual the story is a little bit more
complicated than that and also a bit more sponsored by cablemod cablemod
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all their products using the code 10 cable mod at the link below when i was a
wee lad the solution to this problem was simple you dropped off your phone at
that mall kiosk that smelled vaguely of cheese and a couple of hours later you'd
pick it up with a brand new screen that smelled deadly of cheese these days
the process of having a phone repaired has evolved as much as the phones
themselves starting with the iphone 6 this one coincidentally certain
components like the home button became electronically tethered to the logic
board and replacing them outside of apple official channels would result in
error messages and anti-consumer practice that apple justifies by saying
it is necessary for security it's not
what it's actually about is controlling access to parts and services which
preserves profit for apple and its partners as long as those partners play
by apple's stringent rules however with the launch of the
self-service repair program in april apple at least on the face of things
seems to be opening the floodgates wide so any owner of an iphone 12 13 or third
gen se can use this service and it's a good bet that the next iphone will get
the same treatment but wait did i say any owner before you can even place an
order for replacement parts apple does have a way to weed out the folks who
might be a little less serious or a little less capable no offense the
repair manuals for all of these devices are freely available on their website
kudos apple by the way and step one is to rtfm inside these fams each procedure
is well documented and photographed kudos again apple but we also find the
first major caveat of the self-repair service regardless of which iphone you
have there are only five user replaceable components the display
cameras taptic engine battery and speaker now in fairness this will cover
most whoopsies but if you've got a phone
with physical damage to the frame but that otherwise functions perfectly or if
you've got charging problems with the lightning connector you are going to
have to look elsewhere speaking of problems we've got a behind-the-scenes
look at the tech problems that we encounter here at the office it's up on Floatplane.com so go sign up to check it
out from here the requirements for renting or buying tools and replacement
parts are surprisingly simple first you need to prove that you read the manual
at least far enough to get the little code from it second you must provide the
serial number of the device to be repaired and third you're going to need
some money given the choice we would recommend renting rather than buying the
equipment it's surprisingly affordable you pay only 49 us dollars to cover both
tools and shipping in both directions and you've got one week from the date of
their arrival to perform your repair there's unfortunately no option for time
extension though if you end up needing them for longer than those seven days
and apple will charge you an unspecified fee along with tax if you're late to
give them back or the full cost of the tools if you don't return them at all if
you do wish to buy rather than rent watch out because while some tools will
have the same function or dimensions they may be referred to by different
part numbers in different manuals making it a bit of a chore to search for
anything by part number and make sure you're getting all the exact right phone
guillotines another huge plus of renting is that it's much more of an all-in-one
solution you choose the kit that's appropriate for your phone and it arrives with everything you need in hard
shell pelican cases with wheels i like it for us though we knew that the tools
would have to stick around the office for longer than a week so we chose to pay for them in full that's why they
came in these boring cardboard boxes though we did note while unboxing them
that apple uses a high quality closed cell phone that is cut to the exact
dimensions of our tools and everything arrived in perfect working order
speaking of unboxing you can do it in comfort with the ShortCircuit hoodie from ltdstore.com why don't we play with
some of these yeah all right full credit for quality they're using vera bits and
these look like vera torque drivers for removal it doesn't matter which one we
use i'm just going to grab a random one one thing apple doesn't include is a
parts tray so if you want to keep track of these tiny little screws and these
are actually on the bigger side you're going to want to get at the very least a
magnet off your fridge then we loosen the clamp
slide it into the heated display
pocket clamp that bad boy into place oh not coming out again credit apple i've
paid more for less when it comes to the complexity and quality of the tooling on
things like camera equipment these are probably the contacts for uh yep there
they are for heating up this whole assembly
that lock i like it no offense to ifixit but it
kind of makes the eye opener look like a caveman tool you microwave it and put it
down on the edges that you're trying to soften the glue on
this will freely spin rather than allow you to over torque it onto your display
see that stops going down now we power up our heated display removal fixture
you just rotate this knob and hit the switch at the back oh is it going now
right now it's going through a cycle where it needs to be at temperature for
two minutes after which time we are going to
lower the suction cup on and we should be able to pull the display off
all right geez
now the knob goes down as far as it goes this buddy goes into place can confirm
it is a little toasty now buddy you gonna peel up does it say how long it
will take i can definitely see the display bowing
up we want to aim for the i guess this is the bottom of the phone bottom edge
pop that into place and it should be as simple as turning the knob
counterclockwise and they want 30 seconds oh yeah oh it's pulling with the
display up five degrees we are clear to pull the suction cup off ooh come on
and pull the phone out of the heated display fixture
you could oh you could burn yourself on this all right
having gone through that i gotta say having the proper tools it's a good
thing with that said nobody's blaming
companies like ifixit for not having the proper tools if apple made them broadly
available we'd all love to have the proper tools to do this work even this
little machined holder is a potential lifesaver because it prevents you from
putting too much strain on these ribbon cables which can cause them to shear i
just broke a ribbon cable but tools are only half of the equation you won't be
repairing much of anything without new parts to replace the old busted ones
that's where things get a little bit less friendly apple offers a bundle of
parts for each of the user serviceable components but be warned these bundles
are not necessarily all-encompassing and you will need to double check with the
manual to ensure you're getting all of the small odds and ends you need you can
order an infinite number of consumables at once like shims adhesives and screws
but only one of each major component at a
time worryingly there is no word on how many
of these you're allowed to purchase in the lifetime of your device or if
there's some kind of waiting period between buying two of the same
components say you want to replace your battery once a year for the lifetime of
your device will apple cut you off at some point we don't know but what we do
know is that they could and this is such a clear indication of apple's true
attitude toward user repair that it's a privilege that they are granting you
rather than your right we'll just have to let the service mature then and if
there is such a limit i'm sure someone's going to be clumsy enough to find it and
post about it on reddit bringing us then to our next stumbling block for apple
time in addition to the shipping time for your order from the self-service repair
shop you're going to need to factor in one to three days of processing time
before anything will even be put in the mail so apple is making this service an
option but if you need your phone back up and running quickly like oh i don't
know most people it's unlikely to be an attractive one compared to i'm Linus
from Linus tech tips
and we need to talk about those fees or at least we wanted to when we called in
the apple store flat out refused to offer any kind of quote for work over
the phone insisting that we come in for a service estimate i do understand that
not every diagnosis can be done remotely but this policy seems to exist only to
give store employees an opportunity to present alternate solutions like say for
example new devices especially if you consider that they also have this page
up on their website which you can find if you dig hard enough so i guess we'll
use numbers from here let's take our iphone 12 pro max here as an example
we're looking at 330 dollars to let apple take care of an out of warranty
display replacement that's a lot less than the 700 plus dollars that we spent
buying all these tools but there are still some problems here
even if you choose to rent you're looking at right around 340 dollars for
that same procedure using those same tools if you do it yourself and that is
after apple's generous credit for returning your old parts for some
context by the way the used battery and screen of this particular iphone were
only worth about 58 combined even the most unfair video
games offer a better buyback price than that on your used gear and if we forget
to send those parts back that 340 figure jumps to 375.
how on earth does the math work on this apple i mean i can understand that these
are genuine replacement parts not to be confused with say for example this OLED
screen we got on ebay for about 200 bucks but if your own technicians who
presumably are paid actually it's about 20 an hour can do this for 329 with
non-ebay screens then something's gone terribly wrong if it costs us more to do
it ourselves as a first-timer sarah's screen repair on her own phone took
about four hours which means that even if she values her time at only minimum
wage which she don't trust me i know it
cost her nearly 440 us dollars to fix
her phone herself when apple would have done the work for a hundred and ten
dollars less the only way then that this
makes any sense is if you live three to
five hours away from an apple store actually no even then a whole ass iphone
se third gen costs less than what sarah paid to fix her own screen and that's
before any trading credits or carrier subsidies on that new device it's almost
like making this an awful value for their customers was apple's goal from
the start but hold on you might be thinking maybe this becomes a better
value for a small-time repair shop who buys the tools like we did well as far
as we can tell that's unlikely aside from the parts pricing being insultingly
high they require a device serial number in order to order replacements remember
that'll prevent any casual repair hustler from having inventory on hand
that's ready for potential customers and if you have to wait for the replacement
anyway then starting to see a pattern here you might as well just go straight
to the apple store it's what we expected but
i can't help but still be disappointed this could have been a huge step forward
for right to repair and apple could have been at the forefront but it's obvious
now that we've dug deeper that the program was designed to be as unappealing as possible apple's exact
reasons for making self-service repair suck are as impenetrable as they always
are i don't know anything about what you're talking about but some obvious
guesses include increasing profit margins i mean if you can charge more
for the individual parts compared to if they bought the whole thing i guess
that's good for your shareholders pushing users to buy new devices rather
than continue using their old ones or just maybe as simple as having something
to point to when government pressure increases to support right to repair so
they can say hey look we tried and no one did it so clearly this doesn't
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looking for something else to watch the iphone 13
well it's a pretty great phone as long as it isn't broken so we've got our full
review linked down below