[jam8]

Please give your opinions about purchasing applecare for a used machine...i appreciate all responses very much.

My personal situation is that I just bought a 11 month old ibook, and i need to decide if applecare would be the smartest choice.

[ghporter]

Do you know that the original owner treated the machine with kid gloves? Did the original owner baby the machine? Did he/she meticulously clean every millimeter inside and out on a regular basis? Was the machine only used in a perfectly clean and dust-free environment at perfect temperatures and exactly 50% relative humidity 24/7?

Yeah, I'd go for Applecare. Right away!

[dreilly1]

I have mixed feelings about AppleCare. I got AppleCare on my G3 iBook, and it's currently on its third motherboard (due to the backlight cable shorting out the MB) in two and a half years. Should I have needed AppleCare to get it fixed when it was a widespread problem that lots of people have reported? Probably not. But without AppleCare, I would have had to do a lot of whining and moaning, and I probably still wouldn't have gotten the second repair. I think that AppleCare is basically a warranty against bad design on Apple's part, and it's so prevalent in their laptops that it's almost a necessity for some models.

The first thing you should do is try to get a feel from these boards and other places as to how durable your particular iBook model is. It's very much hit or miss. Before my current iBook, I had the original dual-USB 500MHz iBook, which was solid as a rock, and I didn't buy the AppleCare on that one. I sold it when I bought my 800 MHz, and it's performed beautifully for the new owner, only needing a new battery.

[jam8]

The original owner is a photographer and also works at an apple retail store. Sorry i left that out.

Edit: It's the 1 ghz model, bought new in september 2004

[krx]

I have the 14" 1 GHz iBook, bought new in May '04, and it has run like a champ. Though I'm generally not a big believer in extended warrantes, I got Applecare for this one because my previous G3 iBook was a lemon. I'm about to pull the trigger on a new 12" iBook and won't get Applecare at least until my 1 year warranty ends. I'll decide then based on how it's performed, how many times I've dropped it, etc. But I would never buy a used machine without at least a few months warranty left. You just don't know what you're getting. If you plan to keep the machine for more than a year, I would definitely pony up for AC.