Prediction: Apple Makes Over $100 Million a Year Replacing Cracked iPhones

iPhone Cracked

iPhone Glass Shattered

Today TechCrunch posted an article with a video entitled “Watch An iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S II Take Three Nasty Drops Onto Concrete.”

There have been plenty of iPhone drop tests posted online, but what intrigued me about this particular post was the author’s claim that the results were “surprising.” If the results are surprising, I thought, then certainly the iPhone 4S glass would not shatter.

So I watched the video, and guess what: the iPhone 4S completely shattered after several drops, whereas the Samsung Galaxy remained virtually unscathed. This is not surprising.

If you do any research on the iPhone glass, you will find that cracked iPhone glass is extremely common. My two original posts on the subject are among the top 5 most trafficked posts on this website. Combined, these two posts have received over 40,000 unique visitors in the last month alone. That is approximately half a million iPhone users a year who discover my posts on cracked iPhone glass. And there are plenty of users who crack their glass and do not land on my posts.

Here’s the shocking part: If my half-million visitors who crack their iPhone glass each pay Apple’s $200 iPhone replacement fee, that is $100,000,000 (i.e. 100 million dollars!) per year that Apple generates simply replacing iPhones with cracked glass (500-thousand multiplied by 200). Designing crack-prone iPhones is certainly a profitable business! Especially because repairing an iPhone’s cracked glass probably costs Apple far less than 200 dollars.

Now, the question is, if Samsung’s Galaxy phone can endure drops without cracking, why can’t Apple’s iPhone? For a technology company that is so brilliant at product design, I have a hard time believing that Apple cannot design the iPhone to be more crack-proof.

But evidently there is BIG money in designing breakable products. In fact, the issue is so common that I have had lawyers contact me saying they believe the cracked iPhone glass problem is worthy of a class-action lawsuit.

What do you think? Is Apple jipping its customers by purposely designing iPhones that break easily?