If you are among the rarest-of-the-rare souls who take a look at the cost of repairs before blowing a fortune on a phone, Apple has some good/bad news for you this year. The iPhone 15 Pro pair, which begins shipping in the coming days, gets a fancy new Titanium frame and some internal refinements that boost its repairability.
That engineering wizardry means an Apple repair guy will no longer need to borrow from the genius of Oppenheimer or deal with a dozen sophisticated parts to replace a broken rear glass. And it's not just easier, but generous on your wallets, too.
Apple will replace a shattered glass shell on the iPhone 15 Pro for 14,900, while getting the same done for last year's iPhone 14 Pro will cost you Rs. 52,900. To put that into perspective, I paid less than iPhone 14 Pro glass shell repairs to get the entire hinge-display assembly replaced on Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 4 foldable phone.
Well done, Apple! I can't believe that I am writing this about a brand that is famous for its service-hostile product design and has spent years (read: millions of dollars) lobbying against repairability initiatives.
Just to be clear here, if your phone is covered under an Apple Care warranty, the repairs will cost the same at Rs. 2,500. But not everything is smooth-sailing though. If you happen to live a particularly luxurious techno-hedonistic life and get yourself the iPhone 15 Pro Max for its exclusive camera perks, get ready to pay more.
You see, the Pro Max trim gets a 5x optical zoom camera, compared to the 3.3x zoom snapper on the iPhone 14 Pro Max. In layman's terms, that's an added dash of sophisticated engineering. And as is the rule of life, everything fine comes at a cost.
Where the camera repairs for iPhone 14 Pro Max demand that your wallet runs short of Rs. 20,900, the iPhone 15 Pro Max will have you spending Rs. 24,800. As for the cost of screen and battery replacements, the costs across the iPhone 14 and 15 generations mostly remain the same.