A Compliment or an Insult? One of the Costs of Apple Ownership….

I normally do all my computer work on a MacBook Pro; the convenience of being able take it anywhere
with me is worth the cramped feeling of having “just” 1TB of disk and
a small screen. Unfortunately, my MacBook Pro, which is about 3½ years old, went south yesterday, and now and it freezes up
after a minute or three. I spent all day trying stuff to fix it, but it seems to be a hardware issue, So
I called up Apple Support to arrange repair.

While creating my repair case, the guy asked whether it was covered by AppleCare, their extended warranty. I'd had the three years of AppleCare, but it expired a few months ago; I replied “Apple products never break down while covered by
AppleCare”.

His reaction was priceless: “I can't tell whether that's a compliment or an insult.”

Hah. I guess it's both.

I'm writing this post on an Apple desktop machine from 2009, which is still humming along just fine. But Apple's cutting edge
products like their phones and laptops squeeze just a bit more out of the space available than anyone
thought possible until they actually demonstrate it's possible by releasing the product, and that kind of cutting edge stuff comes
with this kind of cost of ownership... it breaks down a lost more than a
sturdy old-tech product. In my experience, that's often right after the warranty expires.

Anyway, the delivery service just picked it up. Last time I did this (~8 years ago?) I had it back quickly... maybe three days.
I hope it's the same this time....