iPhone 5

Take your iPhone 5 to Apple with a broken display and the company will charge as much as $229 to swap it out. As MarketWatch notes, that’s a pretty steep price to fix a phone that starts at $199 on contract. This is pretty bad news for iPhone owners; according to third-party gadget insurer SquareTrade, almost one out of every three iPhone owners damaged their phones last year. Why is it so expensive to fix iPhones? The simplest explanation is often the correct one: iPhone 5 parts are much more expensive than typical smartphone parts. Apple’s restrictions on components are making parts so expensive, in fact, that some popular repair companies are refusing to service the iPhone 5. In the end, AppleCare is unfortunately still the best way to save money on iPhone 5 repairs.

The iPhone 5 has certainly been a hit but it doesn’t seem to have been the record-breaking, world-conquering hit that previous iPhone models have been. Part of this has been because many customers are still picking up older iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S models at reduced prices. And per Barron’s, UBS analyst Steve Milunovich thinks that part of the reason iPhone 5 sales have been “disappointing” is because an iPhone with a larger 4-inch display simply isn’t enough to get people excited in an era when Samsung is releasing phablets whose displays top 6 inches. More →

We have seen luxury phones encrusted with diamonds before, and some of them are worth more than $1 million. But a British designer named Stuart Hughes is now raising the bar with an iPhone 5 that costs £10 million, or more than $15 million USD. The gimmick of this particular Apple piece is that its home button is made of a 26-carat black diamond. The marketing babble on the website is satisfyingly nutty: “Diamond is distinctive in the way it reflects light. It has a unique brilliance and also breaks the light up into spectral colours, which reflect within the stone as it is moved.” It is also pretty cool that a product description page for a £10 million device manages to misspell the word “chassis.”

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It might have taken six years to get there, but Apple’s (AAPL) wildly popular iPhone lineup is now available from T-Mobile USA. The world’s top-selling smartphone and its two predecessors can now be purchased off-contract from the “UNcarrier,” which recently gave its business model a big overhaul and did away with traditional contracts and subsidies. Under T-Mobile’s new model, the iPhone 5 can be had for just $99 down and 24 monthly payments of $20 — or, for users defecting from another carrier, the latest iPhone is available for no money down by trading in an older iPhone model. Apple’s iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 are also both available at T-Mobile stores and online beginning Friday.