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Apple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to re

Apple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery. Judging by the sorry state of most second hand Macbook it really feel that they have made their hardware disposable (despite using relatively premium hardware like aluminum compared to plastic stuff on some brands) to force people to subscribe to it. Not that they are the only one to make shitty unreliable stuff (looking at you Asus, Acer and most brand's "family" lines).

wilg 8mo ago
pretty sure apple tops reliability metrics reliably, so this is probably more about your feelings than reality
- MBCook 8mo ago
  Just like when they did this on the iPhones I suspect this is all self-serving. It’s about making it easier and faster for Apple to fix the machines. It benefits us all. But I suspect the cost of their super tight integration into large non-replaceable components with lots of glue started to show up in repair work costs.
  - wilg 8mo ago
    This machine is probably more repairable because its simpler and bulkier and more cost conscious.
reaperducer 8mo ago
Apple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery. It's not about "having to" replace parts. It's for just-in-case. It's essentially insurance. The battery in my M1 MacBook Pro went bad recently. But I have AppleCare, so I was able to walk into an Apple Store and hand it to someone, and the next day I picked it up all repaired. (New keyboard, too, since the keyboard and battery are considered one part.) Total cost without AppleCare: $250 + tax. Total cost with AppleCare: $0. Total I've spent on AppleCare: $150. If I had some machine from Dell or Acer or even Microsoft, what would I do? Ship it back to China for six months? There's no store I can walk into to get it fixed the next day. The value in AppleCare is the same value you have in fire insurance. Maybe you want to save a few bucks and take your chances that everything you own won't burn to ashes and you have to start over with nothing. I'm not in college anymore.
- brudgers 8mo ago
  With Dell you can get next business day on-site warranties for a reasonable price. The tech comes out and does the repair at your home or place of business. Because the tech is often a contractor, in my experience there’s not likely to be an inquest for the purpose of denying the claim.
  - reaperducer 8mo ago
    on-site warranties But now you're back to the parent's definition of "extortion."
    - brudgers 8mo ago
      The comment suggested Dell etc. require shipping to China and waiting months instead of making two trips to the Apple store when the reality is an online diagnostics and then a tech comes to your house or office the next business day.
  - stockresearcher 8mo ago
    Be very, very careful. Lenovo’s on-site service has changed into a massive security risk. They changed the terms within the last year or two. You have to give one of their contractors full remote admin access to your computer to “run diagnostics” before they’ll dispatch the onsite repairman. This used to be a service worth every penny. But now: read the fine print carefully.
  - hu3 8mo ago
    That was my experience too with Dell. They flew a tech next day to where I lived with spare parts. Replaced mobo/cpu (which burned due my overclock shenanigans) without asking questions. That was really impressive especially when compared to butterfly keyboard problems with Apple which was problematic to say the least.
    - reaperducer 8mo ago
      compared to butterfly keyboard problems No gripes from this decade? If you have to dig back 11 years for something to complain about, that's pretty good for Apple.
juancn 8mo ago
Apple care is about user fuckups, not Apple's. Some people use computers with utter disregard for their integrity. Macs, specially Apple silicon ones are extremely reliable.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- wolvoleo 8mo ago
  Not really. AppleCare is about apple's fuckups. AppleCare+ is about the users' ones.
hbn 8mo ago
Apple stuff lasts me longer than any other computers I've purchased in my life. The Mac had a bit of a dark age in the late 2010s but barring that, I think it's incorrect to say Apple products are unreliable. I bought a late-2013 13" MacBook Pro when I started university and I used that thing up until the end of 2021 when I got a 14" M1 Pro MBP. And it wasn't even because it was performing that terribly, I just wanted the new Apple silicon machine. Now it's ~4.5 years later and that machine runs like it did on day 1 and I have no desire to upgrade anytime soon.
- eviks 8mo ago
  It's even less correct to exclude the whole decade of unreliable when discussing unreliable. Any product becomes good if you ignore the times when it's bad
  - hbn 8mo ago
    Not a decade, it was roughly a 4 year span - from the 2016 super thin chassis redesign with butterfly switches to when they started shipping Apple Silicon in 2020 (they also backtracked on the bad keyboards in 2019 with the i9 MBP I believe) And anyway, it's an outlier. Exception proves the rule. Apple's held to such a high standard that people still joke about antenna gate from a decade and a half ago, or the iPhone 6 bending 12 years ago. Every other OEM is nonstop putting out worse devices with worse QC but no one hears about it because no one is shipping units for any individual high-end device in anywhere near the numbers Apple is. They've got a massive magnifying glass on them that no one else does. I could tell you a swathe of issues I've had with every Android I've owned, all worse than any iPhone I've owned. But most people probably have never heard of those issues and/or don't remember them because it's not notable unless it's Apple. For instance, the Nexus 6P failed so reliably after the first year, it got to a point where you could just call Google, say you're having issues, and they'd fastlane you to sending you a Pixel XL as a replacement. The Nexus 5P from the same year had even worse issues where they practically all started boot looping at some point. If Apple had a dud year to that level, it would have been MAJOR news.
retired 8mo ago
I had Apple Care on my 2006 MacBook. It covered around €3000 in repairs. Especially the logic board replacements added up fast. Couple of palm rests as well though that was also covered by extended warranty. I paid $50 for that Apple Care through an eBay listing and got send a code that I could use to register. This was back when Apple Care was sold in physical boxes and people would resell them from foreign countries. So great deal all round. But for the rest I never had Apple Care on anything.
rconti 8mo ago
> Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery. This whole post is a [citation needed] on multiple fronts.
Petersipoi 8mo ago
Man I've never read a comment so detached from my actual experience

Apple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery. Judging by the sorry state of most second hand Macbook it really feel that they have made their hardware disposable (despite using relatively premium hardware like aluminum compared to plastic stuff on some brands) to force people to subscribe to it. Not that they are the only one to make shitty unreliable stuff (looking at you Asus, Acer and most brand's "family" lines).

wilg 8mo ago

pretty sure apple tops reliability metrics reliably, so this is probably more about your feelings than reality

MBCook 8mo ago
Just like when they did this on the iPhones I suspect this is all self-serving. It’s about making it easier and faster for Apple to fix the machines. It benefits us all. But I suspect the cost of their super tight integration into large non-replaceable components with lots of glue started to show up in repair work costs.
- wilg 8mo ago
  This machine is probably more repairable because its simpler and bulkier and more cost conscious.

reaperducer 8mo ago

Apple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery. It's not about "having to" replace parts. It's for just-in-case. It's essentially insurance. The battery in my M1 MacBook Pro went bad recently. But I have AppleCare, so I was able to walk into an Apple Store and hand it to someone, and the next day I picked it up all repaired. (New keyboard, too, since the keyboard and battery are considered one part.) Total cost without AppleCare: $250 + tax. Total cost with AppleCare: $0. Total I've spent on AppleCare: $150. If I had some machine from Dell or Acer or even Microsoft, what would I do? Ship it back to China for six months? There's no store I can walk into to get it fixed the next day. The value in AppleCare is the same value you have in fire insurance. Maybe you want to save a few bucks and take your chances that everything you own won't burn to ashes and you have to start over with nothing. I'm not in college anymore.

brudgers 8mo ago
With Dell you can get next business day on-site warranties for a reasonable price. The tech comes out and does the repair at your home or place of business. Because the tech is often a contractor, in my experience there’s not likely to be an inquest for the purpose of denying the claim.
- reaperducer 8mo ago
  on-site warranties But now you're back to the parent's definition of "extortion."
  - brudgers 8mo ago
    The comment suggested Dell etc. require shipping to China and waiting months instead of making two trips to the Apple store when the reality is an online diagnostics and then a tech comes to your house or office the next business day.
- stockresearcher 8mo ago
  Be very, very careful. Lenovo’s on-site service has changed into a massive security risk. They changed the terms within the last year or two. You have to give one of their contractors full remote admin access to your computer to “run diagnostics” before they’ll dispatch the onsite repairman. This used to be a service worth every penny. But now: read the fine print carefully.
- hu3 8mo ago
  That was my experience too with Dell. They flew a tech next day to where I lived with spare parts. Replaced mobo/cpu (which burned due my overclock shenanigans) without asking questions. That was really impressive especially when compared to butterfly keyboard problems with Apple which was problematic to say the least.
  - reaperducer 8mo ago
    compared to butterfly keyboard problems No gripes from this decade? If you have to dig back 11 years for something to complain about, that's pretty good for Apple.

juancn 8mo ago

Apple care is about user fuckups, not Apple's. Some people use computers with utter disregard for their integrity. Macs, specially Apple silicon ones are extremely reliable.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
wolvoleo 8mo ago
Not really. AppleCare is about apple's fuckups. AppleCare+ is about the users' ones.

hbn 8mo ago

Apple stuff lasts me longer than any other computers I've purchased in my life. The Mac had a bit of a dark age in the late 2010s but barring that, I think it's incorrect to say Apple products are unreliable. I bought a late-2013 13" MacBook Pro when I started university and I used that thing up until the end of 2021 when I got a 14" M1 Pro MBP. And it wasn't even because it was performing that terribly, I just wanted the new Apple silicon machine. Now it's ~4.5 years later and that machine runs like it did on day 1 and I have no desire to upgrade anytime soon.

eviks 8mo ago
It's even less correct to exclude the whole decade of unreliable when discussing unreliable. Any product becomes good if you ignore the times when it's bad
- hbn 8mo ago
  Not a decade, it was roughly a 4 year span - from the 2016 super thin chassis redesign with butterfly switches to when they started shipping Apple Silicon in 2020 (they also backtracked on the bad keyboards in 2019 with the i9 MBP I believe) And anyway, it's an outlier. Exception proves the rule. Apple's held to such a high standard that people still joke about antenna gate from a decade and a half ago, or the iPhone 6 bending 12 years ago. Every other OEM is nonstop putting out worse devices with worse QC but no one hears about it because no one is shipping units for any individual high-end device in anywhere near the numbers Apple is. They've got a massive magnifying glass on them that no one else does. I could tell you a swathe of issues I've had with every Android I've owned, all worse than any iPhone I've owned. But most people probably have never heard of those issues and/or don't remember them because it's not notable unless it's Apple. For instance, the Nexus 6P failed so reliably after the first year, it got to a point where you could just call Google, say you're having issues, and they'd fastlane you to sending you a Pixel XL as a replacement. The Nexus 5P from the same year had even worse issues where they practically all started boot looping at some point. If Apple had a dud year to that level, it would have been MAJOR news.

retired 8mo ago

I had Apple Care on my 2006 MacBook. It covered around €3000 in repairs. Especially the logic board replacements added up fast. Couple of palm rests as well though that was also covered by extended warranty. I paid $50 for that Apple Care through an eBay listing and got send a code that I could use to register. This was back when Apple Care was sold in physical boxes and people would resell them from foreign countries. So great deal all round. But for the rest I never had Apple Care on anything.

rconti 8mo ago

> Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery. This whole post is a [citation needed] on multiple fronts.

Petersipoi 8mo ago

Man I've never read a comment so detached from my actual experience