We’re headed into the fourth spill season of the year: the winter holidays. The other three are the end of the spring semester, Fourth of July and the beginning of the fall semester. Typically during these times of the year we see an increase in the amount of machines checked into service because of some form of accidental damage, and we’ve seen them all: beer/wine/soda/tea/water/you-name-it spills; car damage from being run over; damage from being dropped (into Lake Champlain, out of backpacks or by airline employees); repercussions from abrasive cleaning solutions, nail polish and/or removers; random attacks by rambunctious children and the list goes on…
Just last week, we had a record number of liquid spills in our shop and all of the owners asked the same question: “Will my AppleCare cover this?” Sadly, the answer is always no. AppleCare is not an insurance policy against accidental or other damage to your machine; rather, it is coverage for manufacturing defects and provides unlimited world-class technical support. This might not seem like much, and a few people are always hesitant to pay for it, but I can say that it’s well worth it. One repair once your machine is out of warranty will often be more expensive than the AppleCare would have cost you. These are premium computers that can be expensive to fix.
There are limits to this coverage though, and Apple makes these limits pretty explicit in the Protection Plan details. Unless you enjoy reading pages of legalese, you’re not necessarily going to be aware of the limitations. Basically it comes down to two things: don’t drop your computer and don’t spill anything on it. Damage to the machine, even if it is unrelated to any problem you may be having, will prevent any authorized service provider from covering repairs under the warranty.
Let’s say you had your brand-new MacBook Pro in your backpack and you set that pack down a little harder than usual and crunched the corner of the display. This is a common point of damage that we see in South Burlington. A month or two later, you notice that the backslash key isn’t working anymore and you bring your machine into our shop. We’d be unable to repair your machine under the warranty ‘til the damage to the display is fixed, after which AppleCare coverage would be back in place.
Liquid spills can be even more destructive. Not only will they knock your machine out of warranty, but you risk your data as well. In the majority of cases, a laptop is powered on when accidental spills hit them. This means that some electrical current is running through your drive and the shock to the system can damage that drive. I am happy to say that a good number of people have backups now and some of those who don’t have only lost their computers and not their data. With the current trend toward solid-state drives, the increase in the loss of data is going to go up. Even data recovery will be difficult because there are no magnetic platters that can be accessed—just more fried circuitry.
To sum it up, evidence of (and not necessarily limited to) dents, dings, scratching, bowing, warping, melting, cracking, shattering and soaking will prevent us from fixing your machine under warranty. This includes covering cosmetic damage to functional machines.
While AppleCare may not cover the damage to your machine, many of our customers get coverage through either renters or home insurance. There are also companies out there that just sell computer insurance. I’ve been seeing an increasing number of parents with children going off to college purchasing this, which is smart since more than half of our liquid spill and impact-damaged machines seem to come from local college students. The thing to think of in this scenario is the child with the machine may be responsible and take excellent care of it, but not everyone they’ll be around will be as responsible. There’s always the story of “I left it in my room and when I came back it was on the floor in pieces.”
You can read the full terms of the AppleCare Protection Plan here.
If you haven’t yet purchased AppleCare for your new machine, you have exactly one year from date of purchase to buy and activate it. Please be careful around your computers—they don’t like drinks as much as the rest of us do!