Dropping your iPhone 5 could cost a lot more money and time.
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Ironically, the most common iPhone repair is for damaged screens.
News Limited reached out to Patrick Lee, the Director of iPhone repair company IExchange, who revealed the new iPhone’s screen was in such shortage, they are “effectively being sold to the highest bidder.
“Our supplies are in severely limited stock, so at this stage the cost of parts makes screen repair rather cost prohibitive,” he said.
“At the moment, if you came in with a smashed iPhone 5 we’d probably charge you about $220 as we’d have to pull the screen off a new device in stock, and then repair that one when new stock came in.”
Lee predicts it’ll be three to six months before a supply increase could see the price of an iPhone screen repair drop down to $149, which is marginally higher than the $129 he currently charges to repair an iPhone 4 and 4S screen.
The iPhone 5 has a larger 4 inch screen and uses technology that integrates touch sensors into the LCD panel. As a result, if you break the iPhone 5 screen, more parts will have to be replaced and this naturally makes the repair more expensive.
“It’s hard to estimate how much it would cost, but I suspect it would be more because the screen parts are fused together,” said David Tsang, a repair technician from Sydney’s FixPod.
“It makes the screen a lot thinner, but probably more expensive.”
The only other alternative is to have the smartphone replaced for a refurbished equivalent from Apple, which will cost $288.95.
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