TL;DR – Macbooks are overpriced, so is the Apple care(extended warranty), but the ease of mind might be worth the investment, based on my experience getting a new magsafe power adapter in China.
After my magsafe adapter was frayed after almost three years of use (as seen here, which significantly got worth in two weeks once I noticed the problem) I had to see if my apple care would cover it. As far as I could search, there were quite a few anecdotal reports on apple covering this under warranty, but I couldn’t find any official posts on exactly what Apple will do with this.
But in the end, it all worked out!
So to share / leave a record of my experience…
- You can chat with the apple support in English, even when you are located in China… but both times the chat support simply linked me to the nearest Chinese Apple store and asked me to set up a reservation on my own. All of the interface was in Chinese. If you don’t have Chinese, I guess google translate will help you through.
- Interestingly, the Apple store requires you to add any kind of personal ID – the Chinese ID (身份证), passport or etc – in the reservation process. And on arrival, they ask you to punch in the numbers – but not asking you to show the ID itself.
- The staff here welcomed me in Chinese (probably because I look Chinese enough?), but once I start to talk in English everyone responds accordingly in English. So even though the reservation interface is all in Chinese, the staff do help you out and get things done without Chinese.
- Macbooks are overpriced, and so it the Apple Care extended warranty which I was very hesitant to purchase three years ago. But at least in this case everything worked out in such a pleasant manner. Is it worth it? Well, it’s hard to say, but especially in Chine where (as the expat community likes to say) it is so easy to get “meibanfa-ed (没办法-ed “there nothing we can do”)” at least I’m happy with the overall experience.
- And a small trivia in the apple store – even though the google and facebook is blocked in the web, my phone still seems to be able to ping to the google servers. More about this in a separate post, I guess.
Wonhee Cho 