The Applecare Hustle • Hacker News Board

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#51

Post by choeger » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 8:29 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #40

choeger wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certain risks you simply cannot pay out-of-pocket: Car accidents (my car is insured to 20M in damages p.p.), house destruction (you usually already have one mortgage), or inability to work in your profession (e.g., by becoming blind). The former cases are so expensive you cannot expect to save money or take a loan and pay off the damages. The latter case impacts your ability to earn money in the first place…

> my car is insured to 20M in damages p.p. How much does that policy cost? Are you hedging against running into a gas pipeline, school bus full of children, or something along those lines? I'm honestly really curious about this.

This is Germany. I think the 20M is a legal requirement or derived from a legal requirement (by adding something on top).

This car insurance costs me around 40€/month, but there's a steep curve based on how many years you've been free of damages. A new driver would pay around 6 times as much, AFAIK.

The reasoning behind the high damage rate is indeed the risk to it injure a child for life. In that case the insurance will cover lifelong costs.

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#52

Post by notafraudster » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 9:44 AM UTC

mehwoot wrote: post #5

In contrast, the insured often relies on a recollection of their history and a ton of emotional reasoning to decide if they will be the statistical oddity to make "a profit" of having bought insurance. This isn't generally the point of insurance. The point of insurance is to amortise risk. Yes, the insurance company expects to, on average, get more money from insuring my house than the cost of any damage to it. But i…

Right, in math terms, generally (perhaps excluding your arbitrage scenario for Apple here), insurance is expected value negative to the consumer but utility neutral or positive because of a non-linear transformation of dollars into utility -- and this also explains why your second paragraph is more or less correct for most people.

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#53

Post by Chernobog » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 9:51 AM UTC

AppleCare is such a non-issue here in Norway. We have five years of "reklamasjon" (think of it as kind of a mandatory warranty). I wonder how electronics would have been built if this was a global thing.

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#54

Post by colejohnson66 » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 9:55 AM UTC

apazzolini wrote: post #3

The only Apple device I buy Applecare for is the Airpods because the battery really does degrade dramatically. I set a calendar reminder for a few weeks before expiration to get them replaced.

Check out Podswap: https://www.thepodswap.com/

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#55

Post by rietta » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

AppleCare (a manufacturer’s original warranty) plus a one to two year credit card extended warranty is pure gold. Apple or Amex has paid to repair or replace every MacBook Pro I have owned for 13 years.

Think of it this way, laptops by their nature do not fair well under heavy usage in the year after Apple designed them to last.

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#56

Post by steerablesafe » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 10:02 AM UTC

vurpo wrote: post #48

Semaphor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ThinkPads lost their reputation shortly after the sale to Lenovo.

Some of the most popular ThinkPads, even among diehard ThinkPad fanatics, are from well into the Lenovo era. Say, for example, the X220, X300, T420. They came out several years after IBM stopped having anything to do with ThinkPads, and they are exactly as durable and easily repairable as the old reputation of ThinkPads say they are.

Thinkpads are not that easily repairable. Accessing the fan assembly is notoriously cumbersome. For accessing the fan assembly in a T420 you need to remove the keyboard, various PCI cards, the speakers and even the display.

   • “1010 Battery pack” on page 67
   • “1020 ExpressCard blank bezel” on page 68
   • “1050 DIMM slot cover” on page 73
   • “1070 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless WAN” on page 75
   • “1080 Keyboard” on page 77
   • “1110 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless LAN” on page 85
   • “1120 Keyboard bezel assembly, FPC cable, and Bluethooth daughter card” on page 87
   • “1150 Speaker assembly” on page 95
   • “1160 LCD unit” on page 97

https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/...

I had many laptops and I can say that the accessing the fan assembly was far easier in non-thinkpad ones. I like to clean the fans by directly accessing them, a gust of compressed air cleaning it is wishful thinking.

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#57

Post by brailsafe » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 10:04 AM UTC

This guy, true to his name, buys a lot of Apple products and Applecare. I've had decent results with only purchasing AppleCare on my laptop (though unhappy that I had to and sometimes being told I'm required to wait for them to ship it away for a week), but found that Apple has tried to outright scam people with older hardware and trivial repairs. Sometimes suggesting what they definitely wouldn't be so keen to do under warranty, such as replacing their entire computer instead of getting their battery or screen replaced.

Sadly, I've had to have enough major defects that while I'd continue buying Macbooks, I'd have to buy the extra coverage, and I guess that's probably by design.

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#58

Post by roenxi » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 10:07 AM UTC

fnordsensei wrote: post #18

mehwoot wrote: post #5

In contrast, the insured often relies on a recollection of their history and a ton of emotional reasoning to decide if they will be the statistical oddity to make "a profit" of having bought insurance. This isn't generally the point of insurance. The point of insurance is to amortise risk. Yes, the insurance company expects to, on average, get more money from insuring my house than the cost of any damage to it. But i…

During my decade or so as a consultant, I did a project with one of the oldest insurance companies in my country of residence (they've been around for well over 200 years). They made sure I was aware of their history, in order to understand their business. They started out insuring farms against calamities. If a farm burned down, it was a proper disaster: for the farmer, for everyone who worked there, and for the sur…

I'm staunchly anti-insurance in most cases, as once someone is making a profit it can't be a positive-expected-value deal.

But that angle seems to have been covered already so just to be different - insurers also have the strongest incentives in the market to make sure risks don't play out. There is nobody with more at stake in the event of a bad flood or other disaster. The incentive structures around insurance (in a free market, though) are actually really healthy. It is probably the strongest argument against insurance being a racket short of not-for-profits.

It is fun to imagine a big US insurance cartel acting as the counterbalance to Big (Insert Industry Here) in a city planning meeting because they are worried about the risks.

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#59

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

In my case, getting AppleCare on my computers has well been worth it.

I use laptops, pretty much exclusively, though they spend most of their lives docked. They run continuously, for 10-16 hours per day, fans whirring (Xcode, dontcha know).

I treat my computers well, but ride them hard. Cosmetically, they always look great, but I have had some severe problems.

My 2017 MBP suffered multiple problems at once, and they ended up replacing pretty much the entire internal computer (not sure why they didn’t just replace the whole unit).

Re: The Applecare Hustle

#60

Post by FiReaNG3L » Thu, Sep 09, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

Fun bit is that in this precise case, the people selling you the insurance are the same people that set the cost of repair... no way that they are inflating the second to justify the first, is it?