A new report by The Wall Street Journal this week has taken a look into entrepreneurial teenagers and the lucrative business of summertime iPhone repairs. One 16-year-old in Nantucket, Massachusetts interviewed for the article cited a nearly $24,000 income for iPhone repairs made in the summer of 2016, off of fixes he performed for devices like the iPhone 7 Plus at $189.99 per cracked screen.
Shaw has been repairing iPhones since he was 12, and this summer plans to set up his small business at a table outside of a local ice cream parlor. His repairs include fixing broken screens, microphones, and various other parts of both iPhones and iPads. During last summer`s busy season, Shaw said he was repairing as many as nine iPhones every day.
Image of Joseph Kokenge taken by Sarah Desforges via WSJOn Nantucket, Mr. Shaw is the `go-to guy,` says Peter Bordes, executive chairman of a software company, oneQube, who got his phone fixed by Mr. Shaw last summer after a tip from a friendīs teenage daughter.
`She said go to this place, and youīll find him in this store,` Mr. Bordes says. `Itīs like a mafia; they know who to go to.` The repair, he says, was `flawless.` In Lafayette, Louisiana 18-year-old Joseph Kokenge quit his job at a local bowling alley, which his father manages, after discovering how much money he could make fixing broken iPhones. He began learning how to repair Apple`s smartphones watching his father repair a cracked iPhone 3GS, and then browsed YouTube how-to videos for more information.
On average, Kokenge has charged $50 to fix the screens of iPhone 5 devices, and $200 for an iPhone 7 Plus, and he works on his repairs at a local coffee shop.
When a friend asked if his father could fix an iPhone 5, the teen watched YouTube how-to videos and repaired it himself. He soon earned a reputation at school, he says: `If a phone was broken, they knew to go to me.`
Word spread and parents, too, approached him. ...
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