Broke the iPod Touch

January 27, 2010

So the other day, my iPod fell off the table. It was maybe a 2-3 foot drop onto a wood floor, and at the time, I thought nothing of it. I keep my iPod in a case and also inside of my homemade iPod coozie, so I figured it would be ok. But nooo.....

I went to the Apple store to find out how much it would cost to fix it. The guy there says, "I don't know, you will have to setup an appointment with an Apple Genius". Really? The Apple store non-Genius wouldn't know that? So I did a bit of research on my own and from what I could find out, Apple would have charged me $200 to fix it. That's almost how much I paid for it. So I did a little more research and found a place that sold replacement parts and decided to do the repairs myself.

After watching a couple of videos on how to take the iPod apart, I went at it.

Here is the glass touch screen that I ordered. It comes with a plastic tool to help you pry the iPod apart.

Here it is with the screen off. If you think it looks a bit messy, you are right. Taking off the screen was a bit more challenging than I thought. The clips didn't come off that easily and I managed to mangle a bit of a piece that is attached to the screen that I apparently needed.

Luckily, the replacement part store also had that part available. I also found out that they sell the two parts as a fully assembled unit, because apparently, its really hard to take the screen off without messing up that other piece. I wish they told me that from the start.

Here is the new part that needs to be attached to the screen by the handy dandy tape that is provided. After putting those two parts together and re-attaching the screen cable, all I needed to do was press the screen back into place. And there you go....works perfectly and looks brand new. There are only a couple of minor scratches where I used a screw driver instead of the plastic tool, but the case hides them.

It took about an hour to do the entire repair, not counting the week in between where I needed to order the extra part. In all, it cost me about $68 for the parts and shipping. It would have been slightly cheaper if I ordered the assembled part instead, but it was still a lot less than the $200 that Apple wanted. I would highly recommend Repairs Universe for your iPod parts, I even chatted with one of their repair techs, who helped me order the second part and made sure I knew what I needed to make the repair.