There's a link between iPhone screen repairs and Apple's 2-year upgrade cycle

pulse

May 9, 2017 4:00 PM

Apple's traditional two-year life cycle is influencing whether and when iPhone owners repair their broken devices.

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There's a mental calculation most people do upon shattering their iPhone screen: Should I fix it immediately, or wait and buy a whole new phone?

While some wait to do anything at all until their phone gives them glass slivers, others go the repair route, shelling out up to $149 to Apple or other repair services to replace the cracked screen.

But that mental calculation depends a lot on Apple's traditional two-year upgrade cycle

In the past, Apple has used a two-year cycle when designing iPhones. A complete redesign of the phone is released every two years, then a more incremental model (the S model) is released in the year in between. It's that timeline — which Apple only recently moved away from with the release of the iPhone 7 — that has traditionally impacted when people opt to fix their screen.

ound that the biggest uptick in repairs consistently falls right before the next generation phone is about to be released:

Repair requests for the iPhone 5 spiked right before the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in 2014
Requests for the 6 spiked right before the release of the 6s in 2015
Requests for the 6s spiked right before the launch of the 7 was released in 2016.

Here's how that looks over the last four years:

iCracked also tracked the life cycle of requests, and it's easy to see the spike and the tapering off of repairs with Apple's last few phones. As we get closer to the release of the next iPhone in September 2017, for example, requests to repair iPhone 6s devices are tapering off, as those users may be planning to buy the new phone instead of repairing their old one. The same thing happened with the iPhone 6, and the iPhone 5s before that.

iCracked's data isn't a complete analysis of screen repairs, since people may use local repair services or go to Apple directly. For anyone with AppleCare+, an iPhone 7 Plus repair only costs $29 — iCracked's rates depend on the type of device, the type of repair, and your location, but can range upwards of $90.

But the data iCracked has been able to track is pretty clear: iPhone owners may not have been using logic when they let their $800 device hit a hard surface, but they are using logic when deciding whether — and when — to repair.

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