Alternatives to, or benefits of, AppleCare for a MacBook Pro?

Solution 1:

In general, extended warranty plans are a healthy-sized profit center for the company offering them. This implies that unless a product turns out to be less reliable than predicted, on average (mean average) customers will be better off paying for their own repairs without the warranty. However, if one can't afford to self-insure for abnormal or even normal deviations from the average, something like AppleCare will lessen the downside financial risks.

Thus, I suggest (and buy) AppleCare only if an Apple product seems to be getting numbers of reports of below average reliability (e.g. the Duo 2xx and PowerBook 5x00 product lines). For other Apple products, maybe put the money in a savings account instead, and there is a good likelyhood that you'll end up ahead after a decade or two of Apple products.

Solution 2:

AppleCare is totally worth the money. Case in point: I recently had to take my older MacBook Pro in for service. It seemed I qualified for that Nvidia video card recall (the one where they shipped cards that died after a couple years of use), but never actually did anything about it. The card finally died on me and I had to take it in.

While I was there, the tech noticed on my keyboard that one of the keys had the numbers worn off and I mentioned that another key had gone "soft" and wouldn't work every time. Because the laptop was under warranty, they replaced the card and the keyboard free of charge.

I used to fix laptops way back in the day, and the keyboard was the worst because you typically had to take out the entire innards of the laptop to replace it. if laptop design is still the same, then that work was money in the bank as far as I'm concerned. My laptop is like new again.