To say that this cracked the screen would be a bit of an understatement:
More like "shattered." Most of the big pieces were intact, but there were little tiny shards of glass everywhere. Not good.
However, by some miracle, the LCD screen underneath the glass was completely undamaged. My phone still worked. It was a little dicey to make calls, though, since I didn't relish the thought of an earful of glass shards. That would be a little too much like being on hold with customer service and having to listen to their damn "your calls is important to us" music. Anyway, clearly something had to be done.
Michael was all for just getting a new phone, which is his usual solution to such issues, but I wasn't ready to chuck it out just yet. It's frustrating to me how willing people are to throw things out when they don't work exactly right, rather than taking a little time to fix them. But was this the sort of thing that could be fixed?
Yes, as it turns out. But since Apple was going to charge me $100 for a replacement screen and the installation, I needed to find a better option. A bit of Googling around turned up a $10 repair kit that claimed to be able to solve precisely my problem. (At this point in my writing, Michael is whinging at me that actually he was the one who found the repair kit, so I include this information in the interest of full disclosure, despite the fact that it's messing up my narrative. As I have said before: Sweetie, get your own damn blog.) I ordered it, paid for the overnight shipping, and took to obsessively watching the YouTube instructions for how to do the repair.
When UPS delivered the kit last night, we set up a workstation on a cloth placemat at the dining room table and set to work. The first step was to take the entire screen assembly off of the iPhone base:
It was pretty cool to get a look at the guts of the phone, since it looks so sleek and featureless from the outside. But the inside is a different matter. We then had to take out six near-microscopic screws that held the LCD screen in place:
Here's a view of the new glass, along the with the base and the LCD screen, waiting to be re-assembled.
Although it did take a bit of doing to pry the phone open in the first place, things had been pretty easy up until this point. But now came the tricky part: separating the (now broken) glass off of the front of the frame so that the new glass could be installed. We used a hairdryer to heat and loosen the glue, and a jeweler's screwdriver to (carefully!) scrape the glass off the frame:
Whew! With that done, it was relatively easy to stick on the new glass using the custom-fit adhesive that came with the repair kit. Then we slid the LCD screen back into place. What the instructions didn't mention was how easy it was to get fingerprints and dust trapped between the LCD screen and the new glass, and being as how I'm anal retentive, it simply wouldn't do to leave them there --- that would've driven me insane. We fixed the problem with a few squirts of compressed air and some elbow grease applied via a microfiber cloth.
Finally, though, everything was clean, and we snapped the LCD into place on the frame, replaced the six near-microscopic screws, and reattached the top assembly to the base of the phone.
Et voilà!
Good as new. The home button is a little loose, probably because the top assembly doesn't fit quite as perfectly onto the base as it did before, but that's the only issue. Otherwise, it's clean and works just as well as the day I got it. Plus, I get to say that I disassembled an iPhone. Now, isn't that worth $10?
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