I'm buying a macbook. Shall I buy applecare?

Question

I'm buying a macbook. Shall I buy applecare?

Answer 1

Within my family we have experience of both windows and Apple laptops.  With all of them an extended warranty / applecare was bought.  All of the windows machines and one of the Apples needed this.  The applecare meant that a broken machine was taken into the store and a fully working one taken out on the same visit - it was an excellent service.  The same could not be said of the windows laptops, which were away for a couple of weeks for each repair.

Laptops do seem to be less reliable than desktops.  I'd always buy an extended warranty for a laptop.

If you are in education (staff or student) then Applecare is heavily discounted.

Answer 2

Hard question. It's really a gamble. I have lots of friends who have Apples. None of them did. Apple is rated at the top, with only Lenovo second, in terms of hardware reliability. And they are many times the others. That says a lot.

On the other hand, a repair costs a pretty penny. And Apple's TOTALLY free 100%FULLNOQUESTIONSASKED support is only 90 days, and at 89 days you have to decide whether you're going to buy into Applecare. EEEK!

I finally decided not to. I bought my Macbook Pro in January. I'm STILL waiting to see whether my decision was correct.

No one but you can or should make that final heavy duty decision.

Answer 3

It's really a personal choice. I've been using an iBook for 3 years and never once had an issue that I couldn't fix myself.