A friend of mine told me about the incident he had with his powerbook where he dropped it by accident and the power plug and speaker (he has the 17″ powerbook) right next to it were damaged and needed to be replaced. When he took it in to have it serviced, he was told that his airport card had been damaged as well and needed to be replaced as well. Parts and labor were going to be in the $500 figure. His machine is beyond the 1 year warranty period and he does not have AppleCare.

I usually bring my powerbook to the office since I usually need to do some things during lunch or whatever. This afternoon, for some reason, the machine would not wake up some that has never happen before. I ended up having to power off the machine, wait a few minutes and power it back on. Everything is working just fine but that little incident reminded me that I am almost done with my 1-year warranty period and I had been meaning to look into AppleCare.

I was thinking of not extending the warranty since I have not had any problems with this machine. Especially when I checked the price ($349) this morning at the Apple store. Aside from the story above I asked a friend of mine if he would buy the warranty for a laptop. He told me that given the Apple issues with logic boards and other things that have been identified after 1 year, plus the fact it is a laptop that he would. I checked online to see what other people in a similar situation decided to do and that really didn’t help since everyone had their own opinion.

I ended up buying AppleCare, extending my warranty period to three years, because of the little incident that I had this afternoon and also because I qualify for the educational discount dropping the price to $239. Not a bad price when you consider how much I paid for the powerbook itself. I rather have the peace of mind knowing that my machine will be covered by Apple for 2 more years. I might be ready to get a new one around that time too!