It is truly an awful moment when you watch as your beautiful iPhone goes crashing down to hard cement and there’s nothing you can do. In the past, if you wanted to get a cracked iPhone screen fixed, you had to leave your precious iDevice with Apple so the company could send it off to get repaired. However, with the release of the iPhone 5, this no longer seems to be the case.

According to iMore, those with the AppleCare protection plan will get their cracked iPhone 5 screens replaced in-store, rather than receiving a refurbished device or sending the broken iPhone off to get fixed. This report also states that the equipment to swap the screen has started appearing in stores already.

“iMore has learned from sources within Apple retail that broken iPhone 5 displays may soon be getting replaced in-store. This would be a change from Apple’s current iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 practice, which consisted of swapping the entire iPhone out for a new or refurbished one. Sources within Apple retail have told us that equipment used to remove the screens has started appearing in their stores.”

This change has most likely been put in place because of the iPhone 5′s new unibody design, which makes it a lot easier to replace the screen when compared to the previous two iPhones.

This personally doesn’t affect me because I’m far too cheap to get AppleCare, but I suppose this is good for those AppleCare users who have grown emotionally attached to their iPhones.

Via: iMore