Till now, if you drunkenly dropped your iPhone in the urinal at Grassroots Tavern, you took it to Dr. Brendan a few doors over. But your options just got upgraded: Simple Mac has opened on the other side of the block.
We didn’t notice this place when it opened a couple of months ago, since it’s hidden away on the second floor of 33 St. Marks and hasn’t been advertising with quite the fervor of the Cellphone Doctor. But it turns out to be a solid option: to try it out, I went in not as a reporter but as a paying customer, with one of my many, many cracked iPhones.
The certified Apple technician told me that for $95 plus tax he’d fix the iPhone 5 within 15 minutes — even faster than the 30 minutes promised on the side of the building and on the website. Compare that to Dr. Brendan, where a clerk told me it would cost $99 and take an hour (they were short-staffed and a couple of people were already ahead of me in the day’s queue).
(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
Both shops insure their work with a year’s warrantee for factory defects (Simple Mac calls theirs an “awesomeness guarantee”), and both replace your screen with a non-Apple product, since (according to the friendly, straight-forward clerk at Simple Mac) Apple doesn’t sell screens to indie repair shops. But once my phone was fixed (in less than 15 minutes, as promised), it seemed good as new — with free protective film affixed to the screen, to boot.
To make the competition even stiffer, Basic Mac also repairs Macs, a la Dr. Brendan, and also offers free housecalls, a la Dr. Brendan. It’s only a matter of time before they get a custom-wrapped Fiat.