Study: Apple Users Spend Nearly $6 Billion To Fix Broken iPhones

[ScottW]

Source: Study: Apple Users Spend Nearly $6 Billion To Fix Broken iPhones

SquareTrade, a technology protection plan provider, surveyed more than 2,000 iPhone users and found that they have spent $5.9 billion in order to repair their devices. Thirty percent of those surveyed damaged their iPhones over the last 12 months alone.

WOW! Those are some rich iPhone owners and mighty clumsy I would have to say.

Math: 5,900,000,000/2000 = 2,950,000 each! Of course, that number is really higher, because I'm counting everyone in the survey.

Guess whoever wrote the article was a little confused. Plus, they should really put it all in perspective and use percentages and see how that compares to other phones, repair cost vs up-front cost, etc.

Afterall, it takes a lot of money to repair commercial jets, that would be a big number as well.

 

[Giaguara]

Awesome maths "I'm broke, so I need to make up my mind - either buy a big house or fix my iPhone..." - if I had a tenth of what those 2000 people surveyed have used for the phone repairs in average, I'd get a house.

I guess we could try to extrapolate those statistics so that the $5.9 billion were to cover all the repairs of all the iPhone owners out there... There are about 200 million iPhones sold in total. If each phone were repaired so we had the number above divided by 200 million instead, each repair would be in average $29.50. But as it's just 30 % of the users being clumsy, the repair cost for for 30 % of all devices repaired would be $98.33. But even with those numbers... are 30 % of the iPhone users REALLY that clumsy? Or do 30 % of iPhone users also have a Blendtec blender and they try to do this? I can't believe that a) 30 % of the iPhones would actually need repair in their lifetime, and b) that said repair would then come to those numbers. Of the 5 iPhones I've been using so far (all hand-me-downs by the way), only one has needed repair: a service part that was about $5, and which was for water damage. Even if I counted any extra cables or headphones (or even all the iPhone cases) I wouldn't come to those numbers per iPhone or repair.

But let's dig other numbers. Like these, also from SquareTrade:

"The iPhone 4 was the most reliable phone, with 2.1% projected to have a non- accident malfunction in the first 12 months The major makers of Android devices, Motorola and HTC, were also very reliable, with just 2.3% and 3.7%."

"The iPhone 3GS had the lowest overall failure rates, with just 11.7% failing over the course of a year, and the aggregated pool of other smart phones had the highest failure rate at 16.9%." - and that includes accidental damage;

"Accidental damage is responsible for over 75% of smart phone failures. BlackBerry devices had the lowest one-year accident rate at 6.7%, and the iPhone 4 had the highest at 9.4%."

Combined device fail + accidental damage on iPhone 4 would be still under 12 %. So now with < 12 % repair rates we start to talk about $300 repairs on average. Oh wait, let's compare it to Apple's pricing for out-of-warranty repairs... plus as the surveyed users were the ones spending the money on repairs, the $300/repair would also assume that all repairs were out of warranty and none had AppleCare. Wait, if Apple's out of warranty repairs were max $199/phone, how did they manage to spend those $5.9 billion? Each repair would have cost $300+.

Now compared to the above numbers from SquareTrade, with these dramatic numbers of the first sentence: "SquareTrade, a technology protection plan provider..." yep. Scare tactics. Gasp. Buy your SquareTrade's version of AppleCare plan for your iPhone, or you might have to spend big money based on really big money some users had to spend on their repairs that was backed up by some research.

Mutated statistics...