Buy the Extended Warranty

I have always been against extended warranties. Always. My theory is that, like gambling, the odds are loaded in favor of the house. And they are. The analogy falls apart though when you consider that the price of the warranty is a fixed cost, and not a black hole like a casino is.

But my thinking was this: not only was the cost, in the long run, more expensive, but by the time something did break (out of warranty), you'd want to replace it. Right? After all, technology progresses so fast that a 2-year-old computer ought to be replaced anyway, right? A computer dying just gives you a very good excuse for a new one. So extending the warranty simply enforces old technology on to you. Not good in my (old) opinion.

My previous post about AppleCare was one in a long string of recent incidents where warranty service was required by a client of mine. In every case, having the extended warranty was a God Send. And in every case the unit would have still been under warranty. So, the extended warranty was good not because the repair was covered cost-wise, but because the level of service offered was much greater. Think about it: there is a huge difference between obtaining service from a service provider, and obtaining service from an entity who thinks of you as a long-term customer. Add to that the fact that AppleCare gives you on-site coverage, and you've changed my mind.

Now, not every extended warranty will be the same, so you have to use your judgement here. But when it comes to computers, any warranty plan that includes on-site service will get my dollars from here on out. So Apple and Dell will both get my warranty business, and any other significant purchases from vendors offering extended, on-site warranty, will get my dollars too.

As a related anecdote, my father bought me a Nikon Coolpix 5700 camera for Christmas in 2003. This camera is a great pro-sumer camera. I found him a "deal" online for $200 below list price ($899, it cost $699). Dad, being a retired real estate broker, was a sucker for the add-ons. (He always told me that a sales person was the easiest to sell to, and he is proof.) So, he bought an extra generic memory card, a set of lens filters, a carry case, a spare battery and the extended warranty. He spent as much on the extras as he did on the camera: $700 worth of extras that, separately, could have been bought for $200.

But, the warranty was a smart deal. It is a 5-year warranty. He bought two of everything because he bought one for himself. His camera went back for repair last year. This year, just before my 4-year-old daughter's Christmas program, my camera died. It worked in all respects except that the CCD must have blown up, click on the previous link for examples. So that's two cameras repaired in less than a year, with 3 years left on the warranty. That's a good buy.

Enroll Your AppleCare

Wow, sometimes the hardest part about obtaining service is the paperwork. I'll give you the short version first: if you buy AppleCare, you must enroll it to obtain service. And God forbid that you should throw away your AppleCare box. This is exactly what one of my clients didn't and did (respectively) do.

The PowerMac G5, dual 2Ghz had always been quirky (this PowerMac G5), and I'd always suspected hardware problems. The main symptoms were that the fans would run hard when the G5 was barely working. If you did something really challenging, it sounded like it was going to take off. Often it would kernel-panic, and many mornings we found it with the fans running full-blast, but a dead screen. Plus a myriad of other problems (some of which are discussed in the above link). At any rate, the G5 had been through every software fix possible (archive install, reformatting, etc.). So, it needed fixing.

The trouble with this, though, is that the G5 was a production machine, and always in use. A few crashes a week were more tolerable than a few days of downtime. So all of my previous repair attempts had to be completed within a fairly narrow window. As luck would have it, we finally got a real server (Xserve) installed for this client and the G5 was replaced with the old server (an identical G5).

With the G5 now "spare" I had the luxury of bringing it down for extensive testing. We took the hard drive out of this G5 and put it into the old server, putting the server HD into this G5. Since they were "twins" this was a great troubleshooting step. In one move we eliminated any possibility of software problems, versions, etc. But the machine still crashed, even when doing nothing. Gotta be hardware. Of course, the Apple Hardware Test (AHT) turned up no errors; darn.

Since the G5 had AppleCare, I knew that Apple would be much more helpful and more ready to listen to my complaints. The thing you have to know is that Charleston is 2 hours from any authorized service provider. Without AppleCare you are driving to Savannah, GA, or Columbia, SC. With AppleCare, you miraculously find out that there is a local warranty repair company who will come out to service your Mac.

Well, it had AppleCare, and I had an invoice to prove it, but the box was nowhere to be found, and it had never been enrolled at Apple. This would have been a total loss had we not bought it directly from Apple. Since they had records of the purchase, they were willing to work with me. Of course, it took 3 hours on the phone to get all of the paperwork found and the product enrolled. After that nightmare (4 total hours on the phone over a 5 hour period in two phone calls), I finally got a dispatch for a technician to come out an service it. Yea!

Vacation Blog

Ok, I've gone back to blogging the Big Trip Out West. The trip blog is here: http://blogatrip.blogspot.com - Blog-a-trip. Links to pictures are there as well, but the full-bore photo album is on my Flickr.com site: Bill Read's Flickr.com Page