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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

AppleCare is leaps and bounds better than any other insurance you can buy for mobile or laptops.

For accessories I don’t see the point, those are effectively disposable wear items.

Ironically a large part of deciding to migrate to an iPhone from android was final frustrations with even Google purchased devices under warranty coupled with hardware quality requiring repairs. My wife’s experience with AppleCare won me over.

If nothing else it’s first party insurance. I will never purchase device insurance offered via a third party ever again. Either its first party so I’m dealing with the place I bought it or nothing at all.

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Insurance for things you can afford to replace never makes sense anyway. The expected cost of insurance will always exceed the expected cost of replacement in the long run.

Unless for some reason you know you will be breaking your device much more than the average person.

Insurance is for things that are unlikely to ever happen but would financially ruin you if they did.

>Insurance for things you can afford to replace never makes sense anyway. The expected cost of insurance will always exceed the expected cost of replacement in the long run.

"Peace of mind" is not free.

Paying ~ten bucks a month to insure my phone and not have to worry about it getting damaged is worth it to me, even if I could afford to replace it if I broke it; because now I just _don't worry about it_.

Why would you worry about it if you can afford to replace it?

If you say you worry about the cost, shouldn't you worry even more about the higher cost of the insurance? Sure, for one item the variance is higher if you are uninsured, but if you have several such items, variance goes down, and you are saving all the more money.

Because even though I can afford to buy/repair a new phone if I break mine; it still _feels_ terrible to have to spend 500+ bucks because I was a dumbass.

I literally toss my phone to my couch or my bed from across the room dozens of times a week without worrying about misjudging the throw (which happens more than I’d like to admit), toss is on the ground at the gym, have no problems taking long baths with it, washing it under the sink if it gets dirty, and do dozens of things I would not do if I had to pay a full price if I ended up actually breaking it.

Having AC+, lets me treat the device with the level of carelessness that is worth the price to me.

Math-wise with how durable recent flagship devices are, you are probably correct that I’d be better off financially to just accept that I will break a phone every couple of years and just eat the cost.

But psychologically, I’m happier paying ~120bucks a year, than $500 in repair fees once in a while.

Yes, the argument is that the entity providing the insurance is surely earning more income that they are paying out since in addition to payouts, they also have overhead costs and must be profitable. Said another way, their customers are paying more than they receive, on average. That's a mathematical and economical certainty.

You are right that it might still feel better to you to pay regularly instead. That's subjective.

Knowing that you will likely end up paying less in the long term if you don't pay the insurance might help getting over that feeling, but that's a personal choice in the end.

It's bordering on insurance fraud and I usually trade-in my devices back to Apple so I don't bother with it; but there's probably at least one case where both you and Apple come out ahead financially.

AC+ includes what they call "Express Replacement Service", where you will send you an entirely new device as part of your claim, and they'll reuse your old one for parts.

If you _just happen_ to accidentally fall with your phone in hand right after the new ones come out, the delta in price between "a scuffed up, used 1-year old phone" and "brand new refurbished device from Apple" is higher than the price of the insurance and incidental damage fees.

The peace of mind I have is that the $1000 for a new phone is sitting in my bank account. If I break my phone, I can get it replaced, and if I don't, I get to keep the money. While buying Apple care is ensuring you lose since you pay for a new phone whether you break it or not.

>Insurance for things you can afford to replace never makes sense anyway. The expected cost of insurance will always exceed the expected cost of replacement in the long run.

Not sure about Applecare but Lenovo has support packages where if your thinkpad breaks they'll send a technician over to your place to fix it within 24 hours. That's definitely worth it for a work device IMO.

I bought this kind of insurance for my PhD (Dell laptop, same 24 hours technician on site guarantee). Although quite expensive, I don't regret it: my screen and motherboard got replaced about two years in.

Definitely agreed, to a point. Phones I used to break so often it seemed worth it, although a lot seemingly had to do with device quality vs. me being especially clumsy. My iPhone has been dropped, dunked in the bath, etc. just as much as my past Pixels but is going on 3 years now. I never made it a year previously.

My laptop I'm on the fence about. It's a $3,000 machine that isn't especially robust if dropped, but I haven't broken one in a decade or two. Probably won't pick it up on the next one I buy. The unrepairability of modern Macbooks is what got me to buy it in the first place though. An old Thinkpad I could self-insure for quite cheap because I had the ability to replace any component failure myself. Not so true on the Macbook. I also see it as travel insurance - I can walk into any Apple store in a major city and in theory get a replacement device on the spot. Of course that theory has yet to be strongly tested.

As a longtime iPad Pro (large) user that always gets the AppleCare, I have walked out of the store with a brand new device a half-dozen times with only a few questions asked.

> AppleCare is leaps and bounds better than any other insurance you can buy for mobile or laptops.

Which doesn’t tell you a lot because they are pretty bad, too. Being better doesn’t mean it’s a good offer.

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