Apple is offering to repair customers’ iPhones at home − for an extra fee

Apple now offers a call-out repair service in certain locations, where an authorised repair person will come to your home or workplace and repair your iPhone. 

At the moment this is very much limited by location and currently only seems to apply to a select number of US towns and cities, including New York, San Francisco, Dallas and Los Angeles (via MacRumors).

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The repair service is offered via third party ‘Go Tech Services’ and can be requested via Apple’s official support site. The description under the “schedule a repair” button reads “onsite service may be available”.

We imagine, if this is popular with customers, that Apple will start rolling out repair call-out availability in other areas and countries. Whether this will be via approved third party companies of its own engineers (or ‘Geniuses’, as Apple modestly calls them), remains to be seen.

This is definitely a boost to Apple’s repair options in terms of convenience, but customers will surely have to pay for the privilege too.

We haven’t got confirmation yet on the price difference between sending your phone away to be repaired and having it repaired via callout in your home or place of work, however an “onsite visit fee” is mentioned.

Previously, Apple had only offered call-out repairs to “enterprise customers” − now this move suggests that the service will eventually be open to any Apple customer willing to pay for the convenience.

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In a tech-space increasingly dominated by instant streaming, social media and six second videos − Apple is probably right that people will pay to have a convenient fix come to them − rather than sending their phone away in the post or taking it into a store.

The move certainly doesn’t feel out of place, but we won’t be able to comment further until we see the price differentiation between in store and call-out repairs.