After getting an overwhelming number of comments in my post, ‘To Apple Care or Not To Apple Care; That is the Question’, I have decided to post a followup. Due to the number of comments, I am going to post a few parts to this followup, stay tuned for the rest!
This is totally valid, I having a good experience with warranties in the past, would not even consider one with out a warranty. This is a completely important point for me, and without the warranty I would be scared to buy it. If anything goes wrong, It would come down to me to fix it, or get it fixed, both at a heavy cost.
You say NOTHING about consumer protection laws.
In some countries, for instance in the Europen Union, consumer protection laws ALREADY force manufacterors to provide more than a year’s warranty but Apple STILL keeps on forcing you to buy AppleCare in those countries.
Good point. I am unsure about the current rules worldwide, so I generally suggest AppleCare due to that different countries, credit cards and companies have different rules.
This is an interesting comment. I personally, prefer holding what I buy in my hands. I don’t want to buy something that might not be reliably sent, or even legit. If you really want to save yourself some money this is a good option, but as well due to that AppleCare is time based, eBay might not be a reliable place to get it last minute as some people do with AppleCare.
I get nothing out of the deal when a customer buys Applecare, we just flat out don’t work on a commission.
The reason I recommend it to every customer with a computer purchase is that, quite frankly I don’t want to hear about you bitching at us a year later if your logic board dies and you have to pay $1000 to get it fixed. Much cheaper to have phone support from home, and unlimited parts and labor. You will simply be happier if you purchase AppleCare with your computer. Figure out the cost per day. Very inexpensive for the peace of mind.
This is a very valuable opinion, I have gone through enough parts and service with Apple to know that AppleCare is a must for me. I don’t want to have surprise costs a year and a half down the line, I prefer to have it covered.
I can help but for the Applecare, I’m too paranoid. Great post!
Thank you. I totally agree, I want to know that Apple is going to cover my mac if there is any faulty parts, and I have learned enough, electronics always break, I have never had an electronic that works perfectly.
I’ve been contemplating switching to Apple. It looks like a good move on the surface (so does buying a car at a used-car lot…) but this is the latest in a series of serious problems I’ve heard about. Can anyone confirm that it is NOT typical for every Mac you buy to have a serious failure, requiring replacement parts, mere weeks after purchase?
Macs break, PCs break, Cameras break, electronics break, thats just the way it is. It is unfortunate that 3/4 macs I have bought have had an issue, but at least Apple has fixed it without a huge issue, and it is much better dealing with a retail store that needing to ship your products off to Dell or HP to be fixed.
Neither this article nor the comments address some important points to consider.
• You don’t have to have an Apple store or reseller fix your Mac for the hyper-inflated rates they charge. You can have a standard PC repair facility which is capable of servicing Macs do the job much more cheaply, often at a fraction of the price for parts in particular as Apple charges double in some cases compared to other service providers.
• If a Mac doesn’t fail in the first 90 days, it’s unlikely to fail in any serious way in the next year or two. If it doesn’t fail after the first year or two, it will be sufficiently devalued that your investment in AppleCare might be better put toward the purchase of a new model or a second-hand model of your failed unit.
• Telephone support is rarely useful to those who are moderately savvy about their computers. Most questions can be answered using on-line resources including various Mac user forums and Mac magazine forums. Searching for people who are having similar problems to yours often yields faster and clearer answers than jumping through tech support call sheet questions.
• If you aren’t squeamish, you can repair your own computer relatively easily and cheaply provided the motherboard hasn’t crapped out on you or a video problem hasn’t occurred in a unit with an integrated display. Instructions for such things are all over the Internet.
By and large, AppleCare isn’t going to be money well spent for most people. It’s an insurance policy, to be sure, but computers in general are not investments that need a high degree of protection as they lose their value rapidly and should be replaced rather than repaired past the 3-year mark. That’s not to say they aren’t useful past the the 3-year time period but rather that it becomes far more attractive to buy a new one than repair an old one past that point.
Unless you’ve got an expensive laptop model (MacBook Pro), it seems that it’s simply not worthwhile to purchase AppleCare.
Apple Store cover most of the United States, and now, quite a bit of Europe. Your standard PC repair shop probably could fix a mac, but would you really trust a guy who potentially has never touched a mac to open it up and try to fix it? I wouldn’t. I would say that it has been money well spent for me, despite that I have spent around $1000 on it for all my macs, it has saved me more that triple that. (New MacBook = $1300, New display + logic board in iMac = $1000+, New logic board, display, airport, bluetooth, iSight, and new upper casing = $1500 +) Thats almost $3800 that AppleCare has saved me, Apple may want to make money, but they still properly service the problems.
This is Part 1 of my followup, please post your comments and tell me what you think. I will try and get the Part 2 up shortly.
History of Macs… since 1986. We use them in our business. I seldom buy AppleCare because so very few fail. Yes, I have learned to fix most issues myself, but the few times I have had to send a Mac in for repair were offset by my savings on the cost of “insurance.” I lost three laptop disks in 2006-2007 from a total of six laptops. But the cost of repair was about the same as three years of AppleCare.
There are obvious exceptions: my liquid cooled G5 has a full three year AppleCare contract. (Considering the issues it is a good investment.)
Two laptops were destroyed… one smashed the screen, the other was fried when my daughter let her wet hair drip into the keyboard. (AppleCare does NOT cover these types of failures.)
I signed on for AppleCare with my latest iMac purchase. Peace of mind. I’d recommend AppleCare with a laptop purchase.