If you're new here, you may want to learn what this site is about. I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In a twisted irony, the CD drive on my PowerBook just choked.
The machine is two years old. I don’t have an extended warranty. Some sort of gasket inside the slot-loading drive seems to have come loose and worked its way inside with the CD that I was using to install a wireless keyboard. Now I may need to have this machine repaired. Will the repairs cost more than the extended warranty would have? Possibly.
First, of course, I’ll attempt to salvage the situation myself, but I don’t have high hopes…
As I say, I find the irony delicious.
Update: With persistence, I was able to extract the stuck CD. It did, indeed, have some sort of black rubber gaskety thing attached to it. Where did the black rubber gaskety thing come from? I think it’s something from just inside the lip of the slot-loading drive, but I’m not sure. The drive seems to work now, but I will most assuredly consider Applecare on my next laptop…
.jpg "The Money Blog Network - Improving your bottom line")
October 10th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
hmm. will you be able to just slap out the drive and pop in another used one found elsewhere? most PC laptops (even 2 year old ones) lets you take out the CD/DVD drive easily… though I have little experience w/ a powerbook so maybe no?
finding a compatible CD drive may be another problem though. plus it will most likely be a rip off.
if anything, you can always buy an el cheapo external dvd drive. yay! new toy.
October 10th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Yea, I almost posted the other day that one item you *definitely* want the extended warranty on is any Apple product.
October 10th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
check here: http://www.mcetech.com/pbg4dvdr8dl.html
This site recommends pro install if you have a 12 inch PB, but doesn’t say anything about the bigger models. At any rate, this is a starting point. $99 bucks and its a dvd burner too.
This was posted on xlr8yourmac.com by the way, which i find to be fairly reliable.
October 10th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
That sucks. I’ve had an extended warranty on my iBook G3 (the Logic Board edition), and while the repairs were eventually “reimbursed” to customers who didn’t have the warranty, it saved me a lot of trouble.
As for my iBook G4, I haven’t used it yet, but when I do, the first repair is almost always more expensive than a warranty would have cost.
October 10th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
I shouldn’t laugh… But oh boy am I laughing! ;-P
October 10th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
I’ve opened and worked on nearly every Mac, from the Mac Plus on. I replaced a hard drive in a Ti Powerbook once. Once. I swore afterwords that not even hot bamboo shoots under the fingernails could get me to work on one of those again. If it needs to be repaired, let the pros do it.
I’ll give Apple props from learning from their mistakes, though. The Macbook Pros and Macbooks are a breeze to open and work with.
October 10th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
It’s funny because I read your “extended warranty” post yesterday and thought, “Applecare on an expensive Mac is the exception to this rule, of course.” Why? You don’t forget you have AppleCare, and repairs are very, very expensive.
October 10th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Noooooooooooooooooooooooo! Don’t bow to the extended warranty! Stick with the ‘replace it yourself’ scheme! I believe the only reason you should go with an extended warranty is if you A. Can’t repair it yourself -AND- B. You consider that the item will be at risk during the extended warranty period -AND- C. The extended warranty costs little compared to repairs. I know your article probably covered that but I have been too busy to read it yet.
October 10th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
What credit card did you buy it with? These days a lot of credit cards have benefits that double you warranty.
October 10th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
After months of living without my Dell laptop, which needs its motherboard replaced, I finally broke down and bought a MacBook last weekend. Funny thing, today I received a class action notice that states that Dell will replace the motherboard in my laptop for free . . .
October 10th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Yep, I’m with the above posters who say: Applecare is the exception to the rule. You buy it, it’s there. They will sit with you for hours on the phone if that’s what it takes. If your computer needs a repair, they same-day a box to you with DHL and if you can get it back out the same day, you will probably not be missing your computer for more than 48-72 hours.
Sorry to hear about your PowerBook!
October 11th, 2006 at 10:58 am
I don’t know what it is in the Apple kool-aid that makes buyers so gung-ho about Applecare - including people like the above commenters who claim they’re opposed to most extended warranties!
Look at the MacBook. Current models are $1099 to $1499. The AppleCare for it? $250. That’s a surcharge of 22% at worst and 16.6% at best. You’re placing a $250 bet and the best possible payoff is if the unit croaks COMPLETELY on day 366 (when it kicks in) and they replace it, saving you $1099 - $250 on a new unit.
Except… is it still a new unit then? How many of you Apple owners are working on a unit that’s still for sale now? What you really save is $1099 minus the depreciation on that year-old computer minus $250. Assume a random distribution of failure and it’s actually 18 months old.
So you’re paying $250 about 18 months in advance and hoping the problem costs more than $99 so that you get your money’s worth.
Put it another way: With the 22% of the cost of the unit figure, if you buy a laptop every 3 years when the AppleCare runs out, when the coverage runs out on laptop #4 you’ll have basically bought FIVE laptops. Odds are that if you simply went and bought the same unit on ebay if it breaks you’ll come out spending no more money over the course of those 12 years.
The Pro models run from $1999 to $2799 and it’s $350, so the percentage is marginally better - 17% to 12.5% - but it still stinks.
If you want the phone support that’s another matter, but for the sake of the hardware insurance AppleCare is a sucker bet, just like every other extended warranty. Put the amount you would have spent on it in a money market account. You’ll be ahead in the long run.
October 11th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Laptops are the one exception I make to the extended warranty rule. I’ll work on desktop machines and I can swap some components in a laptop like RAM or a hard drive, but between the cost of the parts, the complexity of the small form factor, and the expected hard knocks of being portable, I always recommend the extended warranty for laptops.
October 16th, 2006 at 6:11 am
As other posters have pointed out, laptops are a big exception to the “no extended warranties” policy. Unless you plan to leave it on your desk, you can always expect something in your laptop to break, and cause you many hours of lost productivity. Knowing that repairs will be free is a big help.
By the way, you can delay the AppleCare purchase for up to a year after you buy your next powerbook, so if everything is going fine you can take a calculated risk and opt out of spending the extra money.
October 16th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
First off, I’m rather empathetic to your laptop plight–it’s happened to me more than once (foolish student that I was I believed I couldn’t afford AppleCare on top of the laptop). I had a tray-loading CD drive that had a very small plastic bit break inside it. After months of tinkering I was able to repair it with some 50/50 epoxy–I got lucky.
As pretty much everyone else has said, AppleCare really is the exception to the no extended warranty rule. I’d also like to point out that AppleCare scores a 0 out of all the bullet points you provide (excepting the one that’s person-specific, that one could go either way).
I’ve had an iMac that was saved by AppleCare when the capacitors became volitile (the same brand transistors went awry in my workplace’s Dell machines too–bad year for capacitors). The one piece of advice I give anyone considering an Apple is to get the AppleCare.
October 16th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
I kinda side with Don here — people really do seem very keen to shovel money into Apple’s pockets.
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek I ask: is Apple hardware really that unreliable?