Apple Will Sell You the Camera for Your iPhone, for $249

Apple has started selling individual parts through its Self Service Repair store for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max (battery, display, cameras, logic board, speakers, Taptic Engine) and for the Mac Studio M5 Max and Ultra and the Mac mini M6 and M5 Pro (ports, fans, SSD modules, power supplies). The iPhone 18 Pro camera is $249, or $189.24 if you send the old one back. The programme only runs in some regions.

Would I do the repair myself? Yes, every time I can. I repaired my own home theater and it is past eight years old and still working. If a thing can be opened, I would rather open it than pay someone to open it, and the fact that Apple now sells the part at all is genuinely better than the years when it did not.

The prices are where this falls apart.

$249 for a camera module, $189.24 if you hand back the one that broke. That is most of the way to the value of a phone that is a couple of years old, which is exactly when you would be doing this repair. The whole argument for keeping hardware for five to eight years is that fixing it beats replacing it, and at these numbers the sum stops working somewhere around year three.

So what you have is the right to repair, priced so that repairing is rarely the rational choice. That is not nothing. It is also not the thing it is being presented as. Letting you do it yourself and charging close to a replacement for the part are two decisions, and only the first one is generous.

So, do I buy the part? If the alternative is a $1,200 phone, yes, and I would check what an independent shop charges first, because in plenty of places they are cheaper than Apple’s own parts. If the phone is older than three years, price a whole second hand unit before you order a camera. Sometimes the repair is the sentimental option rather than the economical one, and it is worth knowing which one you are making.