

Ask YC: AppleCare warranty ? - ideas101

the extra warranty increases total cost of apple product by 20% to 30%  ... is it worth paying that much? and if Apple can't guarantee its product's quality for even first 3 years then why should i buy that product in the first place?
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jws
Quick fact check: Applecare is 10-15% of the cost of macbook airs and 24"
iMacs. Maybe an ipod or something is higher, but they are replacing a lot of
units dropped in toilets there.

Having bought many apple products starting back with that newfangled
Apple][+...

I don't buy Applecare on desktop machines. It isn't rocket science and when
they do screw up (one of my iMacG5s went through 3 motherboards with the bad
capacitor problems) they typically cover it on extended warranty. Same with an
early graphite Airport, bad caps 13 months out, but I replaced them myself
before an extended warranty was announced.

Laptops are different though, there is an incentive to cut structure and flirt
with the fringes of heat dissipation... I'm about even on laptops. Just before
the 3 year period ends I send them in to repair the accumulated defects, such
as a mild case of backlight blotchulism and a flakey keyboard backlight in a
PBG4. I've extended the life of my PBG4 from 3 to 5 years because I had the
warranty. I would not have paid $800 to have it repaired as a 3 year old
machine. If I had had applecare on my PB5300 I would have made them fix the
SCSI port, but managed to live without it.

Just think of it as insurance. Apple is telling you the expected cost of
repairs for years 2 and 3 is around 10-15% of the purchase price. Most
machines will not have any Applecare work and it is money wasted, unless you
live close enough to the wire that an unexpected $800 bill to keep your
computer running is a problem, then you might like it for the insurance
aspect.

It added 13% to the cost of the lowest end Macbook Air that I just bought my
wife. (Yeah, I know, I paid extra for a slower machine, but she carries it
around a lot and wouldn't notice "fast".)

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astrec
I've got AppleCare on my MacBook.

Hard drive failure; call phone support; take MacBook into service center; No
drives in stock (backordered, they'll be in stock in 14 days); Me - "Just put
a larger drive in and I'll pay the difference."; Apple - "No.";

In the end I asked for my MacBook back, went round the corner to the whitebox
computer store, bought a drive for $90, restored my backup and got back to
work. Apple sent me a new drive in the post.

AppleCare - bah.

