On Tuesday I bought and activated AppleCare for my iMac as the 1 year hardware warranty expires on October 26th. I didn’t take AppleCare out at the time of purchase as £800 in one go for a computer was hard enough on my pocket and since I hadn’t taken out any additional insurance with my Mac Mini I hadn’t given it too much thought.

After having my iMac for 3 months, Apple phoned me to say that my 90-day complimentary support was coming to an end in 24 hours and asked me if I wanted to pay £139.99 for AppleCare there and then. Since I’d only just spent £300 on a PowerBook I was not in a position to hand out that kind of cash again (after Christmas and feeling the pinch!). I asked if I could leave it for a few weeks and then buy it but she said that was not possible and I couldn’t just buy the AppleCare at anytime. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered I’d been sold a line by her and realised that I can purchase AppleCare as long as it’s within the 1 year warranty. Infact, I believe she was actually little rude when I asked that question because said something like “When you buy a car you can’t drive it around for months before buying insurance”.

I had my Mac Mini for two and a half years without any problems. I never really considered that anything could go wrong as I’d heard how reliable Macs were. But, looking back I do think that was perhaps a little foolish as anything can go wrong and most frustratingly these things tend to happen once you’re outside of your one year warranty. I’ve been hearing some of my Twitter contacts talking about issues they are having with their Mac recently and how they are thankful they bought AppleCare as the hardware failure occurred outside of their 1 year warranty. That has made me think a lot about taking out extra cover.

Another thing that prompted me into getting the extra cover was discovering a problem when starting up OnyX a few nights ago after it verified my startup volume. Usually the process takes a minute or two then a message pops up to say everything appears ok. However, on Sunday night the box popped up to say there was a disk permissions problem and that I should repair the volume. I was a little concerned as I haven’t had any problems before, but running the repair in Disk Utility sorted that out. Suddenly my Mac wasn’t invincible and could just as easily fall victim to a hardware failure.

So, Monday I decided to shop around online for AppleCare for iMac. Apple wanted £139.99, Dabs.com wanted £104. Then I’d heard many people talk about how they got a great deal on eBay. Some UK eBayers were selling AppleCare for around £40 cheaper than Apple, but then I saw the US eBay listings which was even better. Naturally I entered into this cautiously and checked out the sellers feedback to ensure that there was a long list of happy customers before me when buying this product - and there was. I got an excellent deal and the code was e-mailed to me in just a few hours - and all activated in less than 10 minutes on Apple’s side, taking my cover to October 26th 2010.

I feel a lot happier knowing that if anything does go wrong then Apple will sort it out. And as mentioned in this entry, my iPod touch is not well and on it’s way back to Apple shortly. Thankfully this has fallen within the 1 year warranty which expires at the end of September, otherwise I’d have a £200 brick on my hands.

If you are a Mac user, do you have your computer covered by AppleCare?