The iBook Returns

As described in bitter detail here, my mostly trusty Apple iBook laptop suffered a hard disk crash in the hours leading up to my departure for the Democratic National Convention.

Fortunately it was still covered under Apple’s “AppleCare” warranty (now officially “the best investment I’ve ever made”), and so through the good offices of Little Mac Shoppe, it was winged off to the experts in New Brunswick for repairs, and returned today.

I’m happy to report that it’s ship-shape and running better than every (it appears to have returned with a hard drive about twice the size of the old one, but I may be imagining this…). I did lose the entire contents of the old hard drive in the process (I knew this was likely), but fortunately, as my secondary machine, there was nothing irreplacable on it before (at least not that I’ve encountered yet).

Comments

oliver's picture
oliver on August 5, 2004 - 21:28 Permalink

How much did that warranty cost you, Peter? Has this one incident really repaid your investment already? My PC came with an installation/re-installation disk, so I can wipe my hard-disk clean and reinstall the applications it came with any time I want for free. When my Norton Antivirus upgrade turned my computer into a vegetable (note there’s a mistake in the upgrade instructions: where they say to uninstall the old version, actually those words should be seven times bigger and glow blood red), I paid $50 to have someone at a shop hack my registry. That got me everything back again. I’m thinking your problem, though Mac-avellian, is sort of in that category and that your warranty would have cost more than $50. Yes? No?

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on August 5, 2004 - 21:31 Permalink

My problem was a physical hardware crash, not software related: I needed a new hard drive, in other words.

The cost of parts and labour for this incident, plus the cost of parts and labour for two battery replacements, would be considerably more than the ~$199 I paid for the extended 3-year warranty.

I’m usually not a proponent of extended warranties, and I don’t have one for my desktop machine. But Dale at Little Mac Shoppe wisely advised AppleCare for the laptop because it’s moving part moving through space, and thus more prone to problems.