When Fragility Becomes Strength

A case study into the iPhone’s fragility and the Apple brand.

As it has become clear just how luxurious life within the Apple ecosystem tends to be, so too has it become clear why Apple power users — often dubbed “sheep” — tend to behave in the ways that they do; they are the definition of people who pay premiums at every turn — with their time; with their money — they are the type of people who wake up at hours they shouldn’t, wait in lines others don’t, and pay amounts others can’t. As I noted in The Luxury Network, there is good reason for this; life within the Apple’s ecosystem is sumptuous both because yes, the user experience is actually that good, but more so because the person you see yourself as within that ecosystem reflects the person you aspire to eventually become.¹ To those on the outside, this is impossible to imagine; indeed, it makes some angry to even consider that people perform the duties of an Apple devotee as dutifully as they do. But the truth remains. And, of course, one of those oft-mocked duties is enduring the permanent anxiety induced by the fragility of most of Apple’s products — namely, the iPhone, and specifically, the iPhone X. Almost nothing illustrates the power of Apple’s brand as clearly as iPhone owners’ behavior surrounding the protection — or more correctly, the maintenance — of their investment into it.

Between June of 2007, when the iPhone debuted, and late 2014, U.S. consumers spent roughly 23.5 billion dollars on smartphone repair, 10.7 billion of which was spent on iPhone repair, specifically. In that same time, Apple’s average share of the U.S. smartphone market, based on point-in-time averages, was 27%.² This means that, on average, since the release of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has owned 27% of the U.S. smartphone market, but 46% of the U.S. smartphone repair market. To summarize, iPhone owners are, on average, nineteen percentage points more likely to fix their broken phone than an owner of any other smartphone. I first wondered if the difference could be accounted for by a difference in repair costs, but prices for smartphone insurance and repair have followed a similar path over the years, and Samsung’s current prices are slightly higher than Apple’s. Another simple explanation for the discrepancy could be that iPhones are simply more likely to break than…