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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

> Next toss in the problem that Apple thought I didn’t have AppleCare on the machine. This is Apple’s extended warranty. This was despite me showing a receipt that showed that I bought both at the same time. Turns out that if you don’t by the machine from an Apple Store, you have to actually fill out some online form to register your warranty. If you buy at an Apple store, they automatically attach it. Anywhere else, you have to do it yourself.

It should be criminal for companies to do this to their customers. It's one thing to require registration for a default warranty, but they shouldn't be allowed to take money for an extended warranty and then not provide coverage because of a pointless paperwork detail.

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Criminal? AppleCare from a 3rd party retailer is literally just a box with a serial number inside. All you have to do is enter the serial number of the computer that you want to attach the warranty to and the AppleCare serial number online in order to link the two. I hate "pointless paperwork", but this is not it.

The registration is because there exist clever amoral people.

If they didn't require you to register the warranty to a particular machine while that machine is still under its original warranty period you could buy one AppleCare and wait to see which of a number of machines broke, then register it for that one. Better yet, buy a bunch of AppleCares each month then sell them a year later on a secondary market to people with broken computers.

If Apple accepted a receipt as proof of co-purchase, then people would print receipts.

Maybe Apple could have a refund program for people that bought AppleCare and failed to activate it? Their computers must know how many AppleCares go unactivated. Perhaps it isn't a widespread problem. I suppose they have no way of contacting the people that bought the AppleCare-in-a-box products and didn't activate.

Apple actually does have exactly this refund program. They will refund you an AppleCare that hasn't been activated. Unfortunately, they're not going to do that if you choose to buy it from a third-party. They're not going to refund you for a purchase that wasn't made from them. If you buy AppleCare from an Apple Store, they'll offer to register it for you right away.

AppleCare extends the product warranty for an additional year, but outside of an Apple Store (where they register the machine for you in-store) you are simply buying a warranty in a box. It's a failing of the staff that sold the warranty for not making this clear to the purchaser.

This is laziness on the Apple Store employee's fault. There's an "agreement administrator" they can reach at Apple Care to get this fixed.

The quality of service in Apple stores can be very patchy - insultingly bad at times. I once got home from buying a new MBP to find that the RAM upgrade I'd paid (and waited an hour) for hadn't been done.

I now adopt an adversarial mindset when dealing with Apple. :-)

Two paragraphs later:

> The tech said he thought they could get the AppleCare issue worked out.

So his whole rant about AppleCare not being registered was a complete non-issue.

I almost ran into this issue myself. I purchased a MacBook Pro in 2012, but didn't buy AppleCare at the same time. Later in the year (Apple allows you to purchase AppleCare up to one year after your hardware purchase), I decided to buy AppleCare in order to extend my warranty from one year to three years.

I bought AppleCare from Apple's own online store, but didn't realise I had to additionally register it. By chance, I had a Genius appointment at one of their stores a few months later. When I mentioned I had AppleCare, they gave me a blank look and said it wasn't on their system. They asked if I'd gone to the website to enter the serial number (which I hadn't), so I did it when I got home with a few days to spare. It was my mistake (technically), but I wasn't impressed.

um..... I am under the impression ALL apple product gets their one year warranty when they first start the machine, which it will register itself.

There should be no form to fill in, and this sounds very un Apple.

Yes, but they're not talking about the 1 year warranty. They're talking about the AppleCare extended warranty that the author of the article purchased from a third-party and never registered with Apple. There was no way for Apple to know that this person had purchased the extended warranty but yet he expected them to.

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