[UniMacTech] Fwd: Important changes to your Apple warranty

[Adrian Smith]

On 29/06/2009, at 12:23 PM, Steven Stanley wrote:

> The practical benefits of next business day on site also makes sense  
> for teaching labs  where downtime of even one machine is a teaching  
> issue. Widening the gap in support  will simply lose business, I do  
> my best to encourage switchers (simply it makes my work easier) and  
> this will work against it.

It also makes a lot of sense for academics and support staff as well.  
As more and more of what they do becomes dependent on a functioning  
computer, back-to-service-centre repairs are a real pain and a big  
drain on productivity.

 From that point of view, Tri-Care was an outdated offering and Apple  
is possibly right to discontinue it. The problem is they are not  
replacing it with something tht offers better value. Rather we are  
left with AppleCare at considerable extra cost.

(We've been "uplifting" our TriCare to onsite for a while now and it  
has been working very well for us. AppleCare is more expensive and I'm  
not clear if it offers on-site?)

So basically what Apple are doing is removing a warranty offering that  
had issues but still had value (in the case you could live with back- 
to-base or were prepared to uplift, either to onsite or full  
AppleCare) and replacing it with something that may have some benefits  
but is considerably more expensive and makes us feel like we are  
paying for something we don't need (and was always an option anyway if  
we'd wanted it before).

They may have good business reasons for doing this but at least they  
could be honest about it rather than sending a patronising email that  
says this will be for our benefit!

Adrian Smith
Centenary Institute, Sydney