It is a question of price, quality, and so many variations!
First up, an introduction to aftermarket parts for Apple products:
Since the early iPhones, followed a little later by the iPad, there have been breakages. There are probably few people who have not broken a phone screen at some point or perhaps needed a new battery. There were, until recently, only two options for repair, either directly with Apple or to use a 3rd party repairer. There is nowadays a 3rd option, being Apple-authorised repairers, but we will leave that recent development aside, at least for the moment. For now, we will focus on Apple Direct and 3rd party; 3rd party is your local computer repair shop or phone repair shop.
With a direct Apple repair, you will, of course, get genuine Apple parts for the repair. With the 3rd party repairers, you will almost always receive what we call aftermarket parts. These are parts manufactured by factories, often in China, that have no business connection to Apple. For this reason, aftermarket parts are often referred to as copies or copy parts. Often, they are cheaper, and often, they have varying degrees of quality. Now, you probably already know that there are copy iPhone screens available, but did you know there are often several, sometimes as many as nine variations to one type model of iPhone screen?
The variations:
All iPhone models have multiple choices for the quality of the parts that are available. Some have had as many as nine different price points and quality variations. Pre-OLED screen iPhones like the iPhone 8 and the iPhone XR, which used LCD, could range from around £18 for a screen all the way up to around £200 plus.
With OLED screens there has become an even wider range of choice, with screens being group into varying technologies. Not only can you often fit, although I wouldn’t advise it, an LCD to an OLED model iPhone you also have the choice of hard OLED or soft OLED.
Brightness, screen refresh rate, definition all differ.
Using the iPhone 14 as an example.
Screen types avaible:
- LCD FHD (full high definition) is The cheapest screen available for that model. Trade price: £35
- LCD In-Cell (integrated touch for slightly;y improved touch response) Trade price: £40
- LCD In-Cell Chippable (Remove those pesky messages) Trade price: £50
- Hard OLEDs are better quality, but hard OLEDs are known for their fragility. Trade price: £60
- Soft -OLED, better still. A new soft OLED screen with significantly better colour and more resilience. Trade price: £140
- A refurbished genuine screen. This is a second-hand screen, pulled and refurbished from an iPhone. £165
So, the best option is?
Well, there is no best option. It all depends on a number of factors. Some are a cost consideration. After all, the refurbished screen costs nearly five times the cheapest screen. At Maidstone Technology, we try to provide some level of choice whilst only using a minimum quality level part that we know won’t cause problems down the line. Regarding the example of the iPhone 14, we won’t use LCDs on phones designed for OLEDs. We will offer soft and hard OLED screens.
Is it the same as the battery?
The short answer is no. It may sound unlikely, but many aftermarket batteries have a larger capacity than the Apple originals. Recently, Apple has added an update to it’s software and a small chip to the battery to flag it as a copy battery. This manifests as an error message that can linger for a few days. But it will disappear. Although there are some variations with batteries it is more about the brand than the various pricing points, so, thankfully, it is a lot less confusing.
Can you tell which is which?
To summarise: It’s not a good idea to go too cheap. Using a cheap LCD screen on an OLED iPhone can:
- Kill the phone completely
- Drain the battery much faster
- Reduce the life of the phone
- Make the phone less resistant to drops
Maidstone Technology
Maidstone Technology iPhone, iPad and MacBook repairs.
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