Buy an external CD/DVD-RW drive to use around the house until you get your PowerBook fixed or you get a new laptop. Don’t pay more that $99 for the external drive. Almost any model, PC or Mac, will work for _reading_ discs. Burning is another story. You need a drive that OS X recognizes as “compatible”. If you buy a drive from a Mac dealer, the drive will cost 150% as much, but it will probably have Firewire too and work AOK for burning discs. http://www.patchburn.de is a tool to make 3rd party CD/DVD drives work for burning with OS X. It’s free. Even if you fix your laptop, you can keep the external CD/DVD burner as a spare. Some new laptops don’t even have internal CD/DVD drives anymore, like the Asus eeePC or the MacBook Air, but if you already have an external drive you’ll be all set.

Next, even if you don’t have AppleCare, call Apple and ask where the closest and best Apple repair shop is in your area. They can look it up for you on their database. Where I used to work – http://www.di-no.com in Pasadena – CD/DVD drive replacement out of warranty was $219 to $269 minimum. Ask for a quote and find out how much it will cost to repair.

What I’m saying is: it’s not the end of the world. You can keep using your PowerBook with an external drive whenever you need to read or burn a disc. Or you can call Apple, AppleCare or not, and find a local place to take it to be fixed.

CD/DVD drives are frail with lots of tiny, fragile plastic pieces inside. It’s extremely common, among both Macs and PCs, for the CD drive to cough up and die. Sticky stuff on a disc like food or a loose sticker or price tag can get lost inside the drive and end it right there too.

Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions.

Somewhat tongue-in-cheek I ask: is Apple hardware really that unreliable?

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.

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.

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.

Sorry to hear about your PowerBook!

I’ll give Apple props from learning from their mistakes, though. The Macbook Pros and Macbooks are a breeze to open and work with.

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.

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.

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.