In practice, Apple's warranty service isn't amazingly better than anyone else's. I buy Dell Precision laptops running Ubuntu, with "next-day" on-site repair. I

In practice, Apple's warranty service isn't amazingly better than anyone else's. I buy Dell Precision laptops running Ubuntu, with "next-day" on-site repair. It costs me a few hundred dollars for 3 years of coverage, about what I'd spend for AppleCare. Here's my experience: - The Precision laptops do get more weird hardware failures than I'd like. Higher than one of the good Mac models, lower than some other well-known vendors. - "Next-day" service in Vermont is usually more like a couple of days, because they often have a single technician covering Vermont and upstate New York, and they sometimes send the parts to the wrong depot. - They really do send a technician in person to fix everything, for no extra charge. AppleCare isn't too bad here. But the turnaround is often a lot longer unless I'm willing to travel to a big city where they have parts on hand. So Dell comes out narrowly ahead, in my experience.