Last week, while getting out the car after the Little Man’s baseball practice, my iPhone slipped through a hole in my pocket and landed, face first, on the concrete. At first I thought it was no big deal. I’ve dropped the phone before. But later, I discovered a long, crack diagonally across the screen, and was dismayed.
For a while, I thought I’d have to get a new phone, but then I remembered that I’d bought Apple Care+ with my iPhone last summer (2013). I checked, and from what I could tell, Apple Care+ covered a couple of incidents of accidental damage to the phone. So I booked an appointment at the Genius Bar for this morning at 10 am.
At 10 am, I arrived and was greeted by the Official Apple Store Greeter, who signed me in and asked me to wait a moment for the tech. A moment later, Tim arrived. I showed him what happened. He verified my Apple Care and then said that it would take about an hour to fix. It seemed to me that the Apple Care+ held the possibility of a $79 charge, but when he processed my order, there was no charge. He told me to come back an hour later, which I did.
I picked up my phone and it had a new display. The crack was gone! I didn’t even need to restore my data!
Tim told me that without Apple Care+, it would have cost me $129 to have the display replaced. As it turns out, it cost me nothing today. Of course, I did pay $99 for Apple Care+ when I bought the phone, but it has now more than paid for itself.
All told, it was a solid customer service experience. Quick, efficient, and entirely paperless!
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For my wife and daughter iPhones, I just bought shock proof cases on a chinese site (around 35$ with shipping fees). Yes, it can take 10” to open the case and start answering, but it is the price to pay to handle a >500$ answering machine.
My 3310 phone fell from the 6th floor of a building, was washed in a swimming pool and dried in a BBQ, but still can continuously talk with my wife’s iPhone for more than 12hours.
😉