Hacker News Reader

At the end of the article: "There is entire ecosystem that takes broken phones and makes them whole again, so prices of broken phones aren’t even that low."

I'm not sure, but I love that the ratio of the price to fix a cracked screen vs the value created by doing that is roughly the same across all model of iPhones. Put differently, it makes sense that you can always make a little money by fixing up iPhones. You'd expect people to value that more than just the cost of doing it (no uncertainty, not having to look around, etc).

The opposite is also true : There's a pretty fixed mark-up for 'cracked' Apple TV 2s. I imagine people are buying used ATV2s, rooting and reselling...

There are already places fixing phones more cheaply than the iCracked prices listed in the article:

http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/mob/2854654904.html

Not sure about quality, though.