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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

You must be doing something wrong. I have had my original iPhone 5 since release in 2013. Ive replaced essentailly every part in the phone but the mainboard. I just bought a parts phone on ebay for $20 and completely replaced the digitizer. Battery replacements are $5 and take two minutes. Ive even replaced the entire lightning port assembly for 7$ in parts and an hour of time. Its the most modular easily repaired phone Ive ever owned. Granted though, this is the original iPhone 5. All the newer phones with Touch ID and force touch digitizers are more expensive/complicated. But the notion that Apple phones are not repairable is just false.

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I just have very bad luck when things get small. I was so proud of myself when I got all that broken iPad glass off cleanly. Then that happened and it was a really dark moment for me.

Currently I'm dealing with an out of warranty Apple Watch where the screen just went and fell right off, and apparently you cannot buy the glue strips for it unless you buy the whole screen. Apple figured out how to stop people from getting glue!

they probably bought the company that produces the glue.

As a side note: this issue happened to some early Apple watches (basically the glue didn't cure properly, I think?). Since it's a sorta known issue, you might be able to get it fixed for free, even though it's out of warranty.

Here's a tweet from John Gruber of popular Apple blog Daring Fireball, who had the same thing happen to his wife's watch: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/783016045481033729?lang=en

Yeah I went through multiple phone calls and an unpleasant store visit and mentioned the people online and they did jack all for me. They want $249 and that's that. They didn't care about my 6 figures of lifetime Apple purchases.

I've repaired iPhone 5's, no problem. I've repaired the screen on a 6 and swore I'd never attempt such a thing again. Too many fiddly, delicate parts and screen glass that's bonded to the LCD. If nothing else I'd buy the whole screen and not just the glass. But the fiddly rest of it still puts me off trying again.

5 minutes to replace the battery? When I replaced the battery on my iPhone 5S (maybe it's a lot harder?) it took maybe an hour in total. The biggest issue I had was with the glue holding the old battery in. I used a hair dryer to heat up the back of the phone so it was hot to touch, but even so it still took a lot of prying - the old battery was very deformed by the time I got it free.

On a side note, iPhones are really easy to get parts for. I had the digitiser fail on a cheap no-name Android tablet, and as far as I can tell you can't get replacement parts for it.

> Ive replaced essentailly every part in the phone but the mainboard

For fun? Or what? I have several relatives who still have iPhone 4 and 5 (and one with a 3!), and none of them have replaced any components. Why would you need to?

I've gone through 2 screens and a battery. Also the connectors on the lightning port tend to corrode to the point where it has trouble charging.

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