If you bring your iPhone to an Apple Genius Bar for a serious repair, you might leave with a loaner. Stores are reportedly performing fewer repairs on-site, and are now sending phones with serious problems away to a separate repair depot. Since Apple understands that their customers are now unable to cope without smartphones, they’re going to provide one to use while yours is in the phone hospital.

9to5Mac reports that the program isn’t mandatory, but that employees have been told that particularly time-consuming repairs take up employee time, and repairing them offsite would free up technicians to perform simpler repairs that take less time.

Loaner phones are reserved for people whose devices have serious issues: if the phone won’t power on, for example, or if it won’t connect to iTunes or go past the Apple logo at startu[p. The iPhone 6, 6 plus, 6S, and 6S Plus are the models eligible for the program.

The catch is that those loaners are sort of the smartphone equivalent of being given a base-model Honda Civic while your car is in the shop, but that’s an improvement over the unthinkable fate of living without your phone for the three to five business days that the offsite repairs will take. Stores will offer offsite repairs and loaner phones or onsite repair as options to customers for now.

Apple Stores will send some iPhone 6/6s phones for off-site repairs, offering 16GB loaners [9to5Mac]

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