Quick comparison, HP: 3 year Next Business Day onsite Warranty - they come to you, they make assertions about how quickly they'll be there. Can be extended to five years (for a Z840 for less than £200 or ~5% of the machine's purchase price)
Dell Precision: same. To add another 2 years to a Precision 7920 costs a bit over £200 or ~7%.
Apple: one year. £159 (~3% of base price) to extend to three years, and no option for more. You have to take it to an Apple Store (good luck with that), or Apple can arrange to have it shipped by courier. Hope whatever courier they use don't drop it along the way, and no sign of a guarantee when they'll get it fixed.
I expect the target market for the iMac Pro overlaps strongly with Apple's other machines (i.e. the iMac Pro's replacing an existing Apple computer) so this won't be a surprise but it's disappointing that Apple won't stand more behind their machines.
For wide-spread issues at least, they do stand behind their machines.
Frequently because they're forced to, by the threat of litigation and/or a smackdown from consumer-protection organisations. There's too often a window where Apple won't acknowledge there's an issue but your warranty's expired so eh...maybe they'll make an exception for you? Or maybe not.
I'm looking for something a bit more systematic. On an iMac Pro that starts at a shade under £5000, it wouldn't hurt them to make the default warranty 3 years and offer an extension to 5 (I mean, who's throwing away these machines after 3 years, never mind one?).
> Contact Apple, an Apple Authorized Reseller, or an Authorized Carrier Partner to receive a quote for AppleCare for Enterprise.
Not so much. I guess what I'm really expecting is that for a workstation-class machine this is the rule rather than the exception.
- A new machine is in warranty.
- You don't need to keep track of what machines you have, how many memory slots they have, what DDR version and speed they require, etc. You don't need personnel to do the replacements.
- In large organizations, hardware is only a small cost compared to salary, etc. So, it is typically not a problem to replace machines every 2-3 years, if necessary.
Upgradability is more interesting to individuals and small businesses.
> A new machine is in warranty.
Warranties are for individuals. Businesses will use them if they exist, but when a machine fails you replace it with a spare off the shelf. All a warranty does is save you the cost of buying another spare, which amortized over a fleet is nowhere near the cost of buying all new equipment.
> You don't need to keep track of what machines you have, how many memory slots they have, what DDR version and speed they require, etc. You don't need personnel to do the replacements.
There is inventory software to automate this. And upgrading a machine requires much less work than replacing it because an upgrade doesn't normally require transferring programs, settings and user data.
> In large organizations, hardware is only a small cost compared to salary, etc. So, it is typically not a problem to replace machines every 2-3 years, if necessary.
That other costs are larger is no excuse to waste money. An upgrade will often make a 2-3 year old machine equivalent to this year's machine, which is typically less expensive than replacing the entire machine. Especially since you don't have to replace any component that isn't actually a bottleneck in your applications.
But the main value of upgradability to large companies is as a hedge against unexpected requirements. Some vendor's new software requires twice the resources as the old version two months after you've bought equipment using the old spec. Either you can upgrade the machines or you have to replace them. Even if you don't always have to do it, you always want to be able to.