iphone screen is not as tough as you might think, but more expensive than you probably imagine

my iphone experience has turned sour last night. getting home i accidentally dropped my iphone. it fell out of my bag onto my hardwood floor (about 1.6 feet) — compared to other phones i have not necessarily a steep drop i would say. picking up the phone i saw that the screen was cracked. the phone hit the ground first in the area of the speaker and cracks are going down from there across the screen. i went to the apple store tonight to see what they would do about it. i know that this was accidental. there was a chance they wouldn’t agree to place this under the device’s guarantee, but i thought that since this minor drop is something a mobile phone should certainly be able to withstand it wasn’t just an accident but a design flaw or week glass. in the store i was told that i would have to pay $250 for a screen replacement and $30 for a loaner phone. the guy in the store agreed that this was harsh and told me to call apple’s service line because he couldn’t do anything else. 
so i called the apple service line where i was put on hold for more than 20 minutes. once i talked to their service line manager he told me that there was nothing they could do. i got the spiel that this was an iphone, some special phone. i told him that no matter how they handled my request, i thought that the $250 for a screen replacement was insanely expensive. he asked me how much i thought it cost to which i said i would be surprise it was more than $100, to which he replied that it wasn’t only the glass that needed replacing but also the screen behind it and some other “patented” technology. he told me that i should have better protected the phone, but didn’t really have an answer when i told him that the protection devices sold do actually not protect the glass (he even said that “they can’t protect the glass since then the touch screen wouldn’t work”).
 so if you have an iphone make sure to buy full body protection for the iphone (which will probably mean you won’t hear the already pretty quite ring because it will be covered by three inches of steel) and you might as well start putting aside a little piggy bank for the likely event that you drop the phone and have to get a new screen. $250, just as a reminder, that is nearly half the price of the whole phone. 

interestingly apple just removed my question about the pricing from their support web site

the value of life ends after birth for republicans

we are all aware of “pro-life” republicans, but this so called christian value they find so important to even kill doctors who perform abortions seems to stop at the point of birth. i guess this shouldn’t be surprising since these “pro-life” people are usually all gun-ho when it comes to the death penalty. now they are trying to make sure that kids once born will not get healthcare (well unless they are one of those lucky enough having parents that can afford it). Like so many other times, paul kurgman is uncovering the hypocrisy of these people in todady’s column:  A Socialist Plot