i was torn between getting a replacement kit from iCracked.com or from ifixit.com. iCracked's replacement screen kit comes with all the tools and instructions needed for the job and seem to have good customer feedback, plus its half the price of ifixit's price.
iCracked buys from Jack Telecom, which is an excellent company that uses excellent factories. Jack uses a copy digitizer of high quality, and the original LCD. Good stuff, but iCracked sells them for over 100% markup. I am not sure who iFixit buys them from, but $120 is insane - you can get a new phone from Apple for $150, and you don't have to spend an hour dicking around with a screwdriver either.
It's difficult comparison shopping. Obviously, someone isn't going to answer a
"hey, do you buy from jack telecom or HY or do you buy from the people selling the ***** LCD for $18 when you purchase iPhone parts?" if you ask point blank. Further, neither is a company going to be forthcoming in answering questions about which LCD or digitizer is used. Even if they were that honest and forthcoming, most simply don't know.
The truth is, it is nearly impossible to compete on price(where 90% of the customers come from) buying good stuff. So, many companies buy the $18 crap and resell for $25-$30. The market for cheap crap booms.
Then, companies based on brand name come in and sell them for $70-$120 based on the idea of
"hey, you don't want to get the $25-$30 crap right? it doesn't work. Spend more for quality with us." They put a lot of time into developing a brand, cool videos, cool website, cool graphics design, cool guides, cool kits, trusted name, etc to compete in the "quality market" - purchasing assembies that are 30% more costly($23-$26), but selling them for 100-200%($60-$120) more money.
The problem is that there isn't a middle class established when it comes to parts for the iPhone 4. You know, the people who are willing to only make a couple of bucks like the crap peddlers, but willing to sell good stuff like the branding warriors. Vendors can spend an extra $6 over the $18 crap, and get an amazing display to sell to their customers at around $30-$35, and get money all day, right? Wrong - there's a reason almost no one does this. The reason you don't see a lot of vendors buying the $26 stuff and reselling for $32 is because there is little money in the middle class. Selling $25 parts for $100 a few times by leveraging brand name makes money. Selling $18 **** fifteen thousand times a week for $23-$24 makes money. Selling $24-$26 stuff for $30-$35 is a demographic that is not met with high sales volume, or high profit margin. It makes little business sense, and therefore, little money. So, it is difficult to find those vendors. I am not sure what to tell you here. Your best bet is likely buying one from iCracked, or finding someone local to do it for you - for an extra $15 you can bitch someone out in person if anything is not perfect with your phone. That's priceless.
after doing alot of research on amazon and here looking for a replacement screen for my wifes iphone 4, i found that the amazon ones are mostly crummy and cheap and are prone to pixelation and flicker.
You cannot judge an Amazon replacement at all. Look at how many 3rd party sellers sell under one Amazon listing! Do you notice there are over one dozen sellers selling under one listing? One could be selling a good one, one seller could be selling crap. If you want to judge the parts from Amazon, judge a specific 3rd party seller, or else it's like saying "The Chevy car is bad." Which Chevy?
Even if you link to one specific product on Amazon, there are many people selling under that same ASIN, meaning many different people selling different levels of quality. It isn't like eBay where one listing relates to one seller. This is part of what makes Amazon ******. Lack of a consistent buying experience & lack of brand recognition of a product, due to allowing multiple sellers to sell under one listing.
I just wrote a
summary of screen types recently. I imagine yours falls into the one quoted below.
The third type is a crap LCD, with a crap digitizer. The crap digitizer typically has a home button hole too big for the phone. Or, the crap digitizer will have dots on it. Digitizers, the part that you touch, work based on a grid. When you touch the digitizer, you disrupt the flow through that section, and it knows where you are touching. Older, lower quality digitizers have visible digitizer grids, as the grid is less defined. For example – a new iPhone 5, vs. a BlackBerry Storm 9530 – it is easy to see the grid on the latter phone, if the screen is viewed at an angle. We will be selling these shortly for budget conscious customers. The crap LCD will be thicker than the original which means the adhesive used to bond the digitizer to the LCD must be thinner. This means the digitizer is closer to the LCD, which can cause pressure points(color explosions) on the LCD. It also means that the LCD is going to have pressure on it from the back as it struggles to fit in the phone, which can cause it to fail earlier, crack easier. Lastly, obviously, a knockoff LCD will look like **** – the companies that produce them are just not set up like LG, Toshiba, Sharp, etc are.
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