Follow up on Broken iPhone Glass Repair

Apparently I have generated a flurry of interest with regard to fixing the broken iPhone Glass!  I spent nearly a week and eight emails trying to help an 18 year-old and it took a lot of time, so I am going to post a follow-up on this project with the hope that it answers people’s questions. Basically, I am going to copy and paste what I have been emailing folks.

The lcd screen and digitizer come as one whole unit on eBay.  On eBay through the eBay store  yallstore.  So I don’t get banned from wordpress by providing a link, which has happened before…just do a ebay store search for this store name.

Maybe the prices have gone up since this seems to be a high demand product.

HOWEVER, since going through this repair myself and other people wanting to know how to do this repair, what people need to understand is that going this route might be cheaper, but is definitely not the safest nor less-risky way of going about this.  I have to do some pretty technical workarounds to harvest some parts and put things back in working order.  Its time consuming and stressful and in retrospect, I would never do it again and I am not going to spend time writing a manual because I am busy and have a day job and a family!

Therefore,  I would recommend buying the $169 glass/lcd/digitizer unit preassembled through pdaparts.com if doing the repair yourself.  Is it expensive, yeah, I suppose if you don’t have $169.   Otherwise, send it to them and have them repair it for you.   I spent an entire week and 9 emails trying to explain the whole process to some 18 year old kid and it took a lot of time, so I am going to spare myself and everyone else who reads this post and tell them that they need to really follow instructions carefully and not get cocky and think this is easy because it is not.  Even professional technicians admit this is a hard fix.  Also, if you are unsure about ebay listings and whether you are getting the real thing, my advice is to stay away from eBay and go to pdaparts.com or pdasmart.com and have them fix it for you or buy the parts because these are OEM and are going to be legit.

ALSO, you will need a plastic case opener and pdaparts.com is the only site I know of that is based in the U.S. and provides a tool that is hard enough to wedge into the case to open it, without damaging the metal.  I originally bought a set of plastic case openers from a Chinese seller, and the metal case just shredded the plastic to bits without doing a thing toward opening it.  It took me three weeks to get everything I needed and then basically an entire afternoon and evening fixing it.

If you have the guts to go through with it, by all means do it, but be warned.  Its not easy.  Apple really wants you to go out and buy a 3G.  That’s how they make big bucks.  By the way, pdaparts.com has a 3G repair video out now and by all accounts it is FAR easier to repair, so if you should go out and get a 3G version, and drop it, at least your chances for repair are better than the 1st gen model.

Good luck