You pay a little more for hardware, but Apple usually outdoes itself in support.
At the 3 year mark I decided to replace the optical drive on my macbook with a big hard drive and use an SSD to boot. Three weeks later the computer is dead. I reverse the process. Still dead. Both hard drives worked, but I couldn't test the other parts.
I took it to the Apple store and the genius said they couldn't look at it since it had been modified. I was bummed but knew it was a long shot. The store sends a follow up email survey and I say I had at least hoped I could find out if the machine was salvageable - I'd get a new logic board if that would fix it - or consider a new laptop.
The store manager calls the next day and has me explain exactly when I did and what happened in the store and says they can send it to an Apple warehouse and for ~$200 they'll fix anything that is broken and return it in a week. I took him up on that.
The next day I get a call that my computer is ready. No warehouse. No charge. They fixed it in the store, replacing the internals. I admitted I was probably the reason the machine died. All I wanted was to see if they could just test the logic board so I knew how bad the problem was. And Apple repaired it, well out of warranty, for free.
I probably would have bought a new computer from them had they said it was toast. I didn't hesitate to buy another mac a year later.
At the 3 year mark I decided to replace the optical drive on my macbook with a big hard drive and use an SSD to boot. Three weeks later the computer is dead. I reverse the process. Still dead. Both hard drives worked, but I couldn't test the other parts.
I took it to the Apple store and the genius said they couldn't look at it since it had been modified. I was bummed but knew it was a long shot. The store sends a follow up email survey and I say I had at least hoped I could find out if the machine was salvageable - I'd get a new logic board if that would fix it - or consider a new laptop.
The store manager calls the next day and has me explain exactly when I did and what happened in the store and says they can send it to an Apple warehouse and for ~$200 they'll fix anything that is broken and return it in a week. I took him up on that.
The next day I get a call that my computer is ready. No warehouse. No charge. They fixed it in the store, replacing the internals. I admitted I was probably the reason the machine died. All I wanted was to see if they could just test the logic board so I knew how bad the problem was. And Apple repaired it, well out of warranty, for free.
I probably would have bought a new computer from them had they said it was toast. I didn't hesitate to buy another mac a year later.