There’s a story behind every broken phone, and Michel Lavache has heard them all. Like the one where some guy’s girlfriend found sexy photos of a stranger on his Snapchat and tossed his phone out the car window, onto the Cross Bronx Expressway. That was bad. Or another time, when a man got fed up with his lady showing too much skin on Instagram so he threw hers out of a third-story window. It shattered the screen to bits.
Lavache is New York City’s iPhone doctor. He’s a modern-day traveling medicine man, but instead of curing bodily ills, he fixes something that’s arguably even more precious in our phone-obsessed world. He spends most of his free time running around the city with his fix-it kit, patching up iPhones that have seen better days. He is the Apple Genius bar gone mobile.
Most people's stories, Lavache says, aren't so dramatic. A surprising number of phones get run over by cars for far less lurid reasons. And toilets? Those things are basically iPhone swimming pools. More often than not, the phones he sees have been knocked off tables or are the product of sheer clumsiness. The reason I met Lavache involved one too many Budweisers and what I’d like to believe was an unreasonably hard bathroom floor.
The morning I meet Lavache, he’s sitting in a corner table at a cafe in midtown Manhattan, loosening the last of the tiny bolts on the frame of an iPhone 6. He's using a screwdriver that looks like a Barbie toy in his hands. “I’ve seen a lot worse,” he says to me and Terrence, the phone’s owner. For the past month Terrence has been using a phone with a cracked screen, the result of—he claims—his wife knocking it off the bathroom counter while getting ready for work. “She likes to use my phone,” he explains. “She has a Galaxy.”
Terrence’s phone has a common shatter pattern; it starts in the upper righthand corner and fissures down to the bottom of the phone, making his screen look like a melting chunk of Arctic ice. It looks bad, but Lavache assures us it’s a simple fix. There’s no smashed camera, ruined port, or broken LCD screen—he estimates it’s maybe a four on a scale of one (totally usable) to 10 (WTF happened!?). “The top righthand corner is the worst spot for breaks,” Lavache explains, adding that most of the time it’s a bent frame that pinches the glass and causes it to crack, not a direct blow to the glass itself. “It’s probably 80 percent of the breaks I see.”
It takes Lavache 10 minutes to perform the minor surgery: He removes 14 screws, gingerly disconnects the sensors and ribbon cables from the LCD panel, swaps in a new sheet of glass, and returns the screws to their holes using the tiny magnetized screwdriver. He hands the phone to Terrence, who considers the newly smooth piece of glass before thrusting the phone into the air like a trophy and exclaiming, “It’s like a brand new phone!” He pays Lavache in cash—$110 for the fix—and heads back across the street to his office with his brand not-quite-new phone.
Early fall, right around when Apple announces its new phones, is Lavache’s busiest time of the year. People are anxious to get their old phones fixed so they can trade them in and make some money. “Last year I had to use my vacation time to see people all day morning to evening,” he says of the post-Apple event buzz.
Lavache charges $110 to fix an iPhone 6 screen, $85 for a iPhone 5S, $70 for a 5, and $45 for a 4S. He says an iPhone 6 screen costs him around $75 from his supplier in New Jersey, who gets them from someone in China. That's $35 in revenue, plus whatever he earns trading in the cracked screens, which can be anywhere from $10 to $15. Not bad for 20 minutes of work. He says he almost makes enough on the hustle to quit his job (he works in IT at The New York Times) and do this full time. but he doesn't have any plans to do that. "What if the next iPhone has sapphire glass?" he asks. "Then what?"
At least for now, business is booming. That shouldn't surprise you: Think about how many of your friends are carrying $700 mini-computers with jacked up screens they intend to fix at some point. The rest of the technology world might change at a rapid-fire pace, but if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that someone, somewhere just dropped a phone. And most of those people lack the combination of time, patience, and cash it takes to get it fixed at the Apple Store. This is bad news for Apple, but great news for enterprising tinkerers like Lavache, who have seen business grow with the rapid adoption of smartphones and customer’s willingness to break their warranty for the sake of convenience and price.
Lavache is far from the only guy doing this. Services like iCracked have raised major money from investors, and IBIS Market reports that cell phone repair is a $4 billion industry. Lavache says he has competitors in the city, but he’s hardly worried. “There’s enough people breaking their phones that we can all be busy morning through night,” he says.
Even on a slow day, Lavache will fix at least a half-dozen screens. Fridays are busiest, which is partly the result of Thursday night drinking (alcohol is iPhone enemy number one), but also because people want their phone working for the weekend. “People hate going on vacation with a broken phone,” Lavache says. He keeps a meticulously-organized schedule of his appointments and divides his time into 15-minute blocks. He’ll allocate an extra 15 to 30 minutes to get from one location to next, and has a few rules about where he will and won’t go. No office buildings (check-in takes too long), no bars (too dark), and no apartments (people are weird). Instead, he has 10 locations around the city—mostly coffee shops—where he’ll meet clients. He can fix things other than screens, but screens is the big business.
Today he has nine appointments. After the meeting with Terrence we hop on the A train and head downtown to meet Juliette and her nanny. At a tourist-packed Starbucks across from One World Trade Center, Juliette, 14, explains that there’s really no story to be told. She was just walking along, and her iPhone 6 slipped out of her hand.
Lavache has heard this a lot since the 6 and 6 Plus came out. “The edges of the iPhone 6 are rounded off,” he says. That, combined with the brushed stainless steel, makes your phone as slippery as wet bar of soap. The bigger size is even worse. He looks at the case-free iPhone 6 in my palm. “You definitely couldn’t have a 6 Plus.”
This is Lavache’s second time fixing Juliette’s phone, but she’s not particularly butterfingered. He has a lot of repeat customers; people break their iPhones like clockwork.
“Did I fix your phone on the way to the airport once?” he wonders aloud. “Did you miss that flight, by the way?” He did, and she did.
Repairing a phone is a technical skill, and Lavache is well-equipped, what with his degree in electrical engineering and IT job. But running a successful repair business is about more than just knowing which screw goes where. His business thrives or dies on Yelp and personal referrals (I found out about Lavache from a friend who also found out about him from a friend). He's really in the customer service industry.
He currently has a five-star rating on Yelp that he’s pretty damn proud of. In the nearly four years he’s been doing this, he’s gotten 88 reviews, all five stars except for a one-star rating from Jon D. in 2014 that he probably wishes he could scrub off his page. These public ratings are important because to most people, Lavache is a total stranger. Letting a Genius Bar employee dissect your phone is one thing—paying a man called the iPhone Doctor upward of $100 to do it requires a whole new level of trust. And the truth is, meeting him does feel a little illicit, as though you’re sneakily subverting the Apple gods.
But Lavache is easy-going and conversational. He doesn’t push people to talk, but is happy to listen if they do. Lavache might not realize it, but he's constantly maintaining a delicate balance with his customers. He's claiming responsibility for something that’s tied so closely to personal happiness, which means he’s often entangled in other people’s strange neuroses. He’s gotten teary 2 am calls from people freaking out about a broken screen. On more than one occasion, he’s fixed phones that have text messages and photos from loved ones who had recently died. Fixing iPhones is a little like speed dating (or speed therapy). “The best part of doing repairs sometimes is meeting 30 people a week in New York,” he says. “I just went to a birthday party of customer. We’re cool now because I fixed her phone. Several times.”
