It took quite a long time for mobile phones to become waterproof. Nowadays in the market, majority of the mobile phones are at least IPX7 or IPX67. Before sealing effectiveness of devices reached this level, as consumers when we accidentally pour water on our mobiles they became warranty void because manufacturers assumed it was a consumer problem when device gets wet.

Sidebar: IPX7 devices are to be waterproof. IPX67 devices are both waterproof and dust proof. IPX7 is very popular but IPX67 is way better in protective terms.

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Broken phone screens are another sad story, of which more people are affected than those dropped their phone into water. I have also been through this broken screen burden. Then came the Gorilla-glass phone screens, which were more durable to shock than earlier materials.

My broken screen story starts by dropping my iPhone to the ground in the elevator. I thought that was comething I can fix. It is just a simple screen change stuff right? You unbound the screws and plug out the little connector which connects screen to the machine board.Install the new one, then screw everything back.

I was so naive to think basically a mobile phone inside was as simple as a computer, in the end it was a tiny computer (?)

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I ordered compatible screen on web and turned on a Youtube video explaining how to change a broken iPhone screen. Up to a point “unscrew this and unscrew that” was easy, straight forward.

Then came a point, which made me totally clueless about what I just unscrewed and what I shall screw back on board.

I could not proceed further, put everything in a plastic bag, took my dead and iPhone which was terribly broken apart to professionals, who do these kind of repairs. I’m not an electrical circuit guy so I did not want to hit the “state of no turning back” a.k.a. “irreversible damage”.

Today I think for someone (who knows nothing about internals of a specific mobile phone) changing a phone screen or changing an embedded battery of a device is much more difficult than before. I lately watched a video of a guy on Youtube trying to remove and reinstall screen of the latest iPhone and having really bad time until he gets the screen working. I feel lucky that I do not have the latest iPhone and I don’t have try that :)

But why?

As consumers, we are supposed to fix out own goods up to point and eventually manufacturers are taking that away from us.

Consumer playground / troubleshooting/ self-service possibilities on end products are shrinking. At the end of the day, it feels like new playgrounds for manufacturers to charge more from the consumer are coming up.

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