Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Cost of Cracking

priceonomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 42 posts

Re: The Cost of Cracking

#2

Post by lincolnq »

So how much money can someone make buying cracked phones, fixing them, and reselling? I guess it only takes one person doing this to normalize the price of a cracked phone.

Re: The Cost of Cracking

#3

Post by cperciva »

lincolnq wrote: post #2

So how much money can someone make buying cracked phones, fixing them, and reselling? I guess it only takes one person doing this to normalize the price of a cracked phone.

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."

Re: The Cost of Cracking

#4

Post by midas »

lincolnq wrote: post #2

So how much money can someone make buying cracked phones, fixing them, and reselling? I guess it only takes one person doing this to normalize the price of a cracked phone.

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).

Re: The Cost of Cracking

#5

Post by JVIDEL »

Isn't it funny how people scoff at ruggedized phones for being "ugly" but then go and slap all kinds of chintzy cases and screen protectors to their fragile phones, making them much uglier than the rugged variant and just barely more resistant to damage than without all that crap?

Mind I have never broken a phone, and I take good care of all the units I have had, only replacing them due to obsolescence.

Re: The Cost of Cracking

#7

Post by rdl »

Interesting. Maybe you could do a rational economic calculation based on value lost per destructive event, frequency of events, and odds that such event will happen before a non-protected event (loss, theft, crushing which exceeds the resilience of a case). Compare that with the cost of a case and the value lost by using a case (ugliness, size).

Although I took my magpul case off my iphone 4 today (to use a tascam im2 microphone), and it's really hard to hold the glass surface, compared to the nice plastic surface of the case.

Re: The Cost of Cracking

#8

Post by rdl »

nchuhoai wrote: post #6

Just mentioning that the Apple Store is always good first place to go to. I got mine replaced for free when I cracked my iPhone 4.

The Genius Bar employees have very wide latitude to waive charges. If you're polite/friendly with them, and if you are obviously competent and able to make their job easier (show up on time or slightly before, don't complain if you have to wait, have all the debugging steps done, be able to assist with simple debugging steps, HAVE THE MACHINE FULLY BACKED UP BEFORE ARRIVING, etc.), they're more likely to waive charges.

Another tip for OSX apple machine service: have an "apple:apple" temporary account created (as admin) for them to run tests, rather than having to log them in to your account or give them your password, especially if you use filevault. I don't really know what the equivalent is for iOS -- maybe turn off passcode lock before showing up?

Post reply on HN