Thoughts on AppleCare?

[marcmitc]

AppleCare does not show up in a search of these forums and it's a big decision. $799/year per seat. Possibly on top of $950/year per Xserve *and* $999/year per Xserve RAID, and only if these are under their original warranties. Yikes!

Has anyone paid for it and regretted it?
Has anyone not purchased it and wished that they had?
Which items do you have protected by AppleCare?
Any other factors/complications?

[mark raudonis]

Here's my take on Applecare.

It all depends on your willingness and ability to shoulder the risk of downtime. In other words, if you can't afford the downtime, then maybe somekind of Apple care contract is worth it.

By the way, "Apple care" prices compare very favourably to Avid's "assurance" contracts.

In our case, we're fortunate to have a large enough installation to essentially be "self-insured". For example, we have enough excess capacity that if one system goes down, we can bring in an "off-the shelf" spare and not suffer any downtime. While we're not paying for "apple care" we've essentially "prepayed" Apple by buying excess sytems to have in reserve. Our X-SAN has a complete "spares kit" standing by with critical spare parts ready to go. Over the years we've replaced individual drives but nothing else more major. At the scale of our operation (almost 100 systems), this is actually cheaper than an Apple care contract.

We've also made it a priority to train our assistants on the careful care and feeding of the X-SAN. As a result, we can handle internally just about anything upto a catastrophic failure. In that event, we would need new equipment anyway.

In a smaller shop, unless you're comfortable "under the hood", I think you'd probably sleep better knowing that you have a maintenance/insurance contract in place.

I know that Apple is working hard to present Apple care options for users that make sense. Whether you buy it or not is a personal decision based on your willingness to accept the risk of equipment downtime. For example, portable equipment like Powerbooks would be a good candidate for Applecare since the likelihood of damage is high. On the other hand, our monitors have been running constantly for almost three years with not a single failure yet.

We've had the occasional G-5 give up the ghost, and of course several internal hard drives have sputtered and died. Bottom line, if you don't have the internal resources to handle the problems (and there WILL be problems) then buy the contract.

Mark

[arekdreyer]

The yearly fee is the $799/seat for the Xsan software.

Applecare's Premium Service and Support for Xserve and Xserve RAID is NOT a yearly fee; $950 (Xserve) and $999 (Xserve RAID) gives you support for three years after the purchase date of the Xserve or Xserve RAID.

[marcmitc]

Arek,
Duh! I *totally missed that!
Thanks for the clarification!

Mark,
Thanks for the insight.

I'll probably go with AppleCare for the Xserve and Xserve RAID hardware (3 of each), one spare parts kit for Xserve and one spare parts kit for Xserve RAID (to limit down time and avoid an AppleCare parts backorder situation) and Xsan support for each node.

[Tim Burton]

we just have a spare of everything, and a safty net of suppurt providers near by