Next time you drop your iPhone 5 and shatter the screen, you won’t have to pay a third-party to fix the display for you, or pay Apple the price of a new device to fix the screen for you. Instead, your friendly neighborhood Genius Bar will do it for $149.
If you’ve ever smashed your iPhone display before, you know that the best you can usually hope for if you don’t have AppleCare+ is for you to get billed the full price of a replacement phone. Third-parties can fix it for a lesser price, but then you void your warrannty. It’s a pickle.
When Apple redesigned the iPhone 5, they specifically changed its design to make replacing the screen easier. The iPhone 4/4S made it easy to open the back of the device, but the screen was relatively difficult to replace. That’s all changed now: the iPhone 5 screen can technically be loosened and replaced by just unscrewing a couple of screws and slotting in a new display.
So that’s the good news. The bad news is that according to our own sources, the program isn’t going well, at least in the early stages. Our sources say that many iPhone 5 screen repairs are going so badly that they require a costly replacement of the device, instead of a $149 fix. That’s worth keeping in mind: you might want to wait to go in until some of the kinks get worked out.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
