I have a service contract on my car, if it breaks the dealer will supply me with a loaner while my car is being repaired. I don't want to buy a second car just because my primary car may or may not break.
The same goes for my laptop. I always pay for a service contract so I don't have to buy an extra laptop that I may never need. I don't like over-consuming.
I guess my frustration is that I bought a $3000 'pro' grade laptop, and paid an additional ~$300 for the 'care' package and still got the same service level as their consumer customers get. I would have happily paid even more to get a solid service contract, but Apple just doesn't offer that (at least not in my country).
1. A backup laptop is cheaper than a backup car.
2. You don't need your car for work; you can take Uber/Lyft or a taxi if need be.
3. If you do need your car for work, you've accepted loss of your car of extended periods of time as a risk and have probably gotten insurance for that. I hope.
4. If you're a big company for which cars are an integral part of your business, you have backups.
I don't take my car to dealers to get it repaired. The ones around here do a terrible job, and when I take it back, it's not unusual for the mechanics to sabotage various components (e.g., deliberately point both headlights as far down as they'll go). I'd rather forego the loaner and take my car to a reputable independent mechanic.
Additionally, the dealers around here usually don't offer a loaner anyway without an extra fee, except under certain circumstances (e.g., the repair takes longer than they expected because they broke my windshield and had to order a replacement--yes, that happened).
There's a difference between backups and failover.
It's unprofessional to not have backups, yes.
Expecting every working person to own 2 expensive laptops 'just in case' a faulty keyboard design requires 1 week of downtime? Makes no sense.
A cheap Chromebook or 10 year laptop is almost certainly not going to be usable as a replacement so it will have to be a larger investment than that.
I can do everything I need to do from that Chromebook, and I have a very hard time seeing how others couldn't do the same. I can use Chrome Remote Desktop to connect to my desktop or a cloud-based workstation as long as I have an internet connection--and my two phones have two distinct carriers, so that's rarely an issue.
Really down on my luck? I've got a few Raspberry Pis on which I can use vim. They're slow, but they work.
But if you're a professional and depend on one being available at all times, it's part of the cost of doing business.
What if your machine was not faulty and repairable, but stolen, broken because you've dropped it, etc? There would be no warranty/repair at play there, and no replacement unit.
So, a professional should always account for a backup machine as a, well, backup as part of the cost of doing business.
If they can't afford a second machine, they can ask themselves if they can afford weeks without a machine and customers waiting for work to be completed, more...
I think the point you're missing is that it needn't be a requirement of doing business, unless you insist on using Apple products. And, even if I have a full closet of old computers (I do) that doesn't mean I find it enjoyable to switch back to old hardware for a week or more, when the alternative is somebody coming to me within a day to fix it on site. If I enjoyed using that old hardware, I probably wouldn't have the new hardware would I? Surely any typical Apple user prefers using their brand new $2000 computer over their old computer that would struggle to get a tenth of that on ebay.
I don't think I'm missing any point.
Comparably spec'ed laptops from PC vendors are of similar price. And even a desktop tower-style PC soon goes to more than $2K with good enough components (if you're a video or audio pro, for example -- a sysadmin could get away with a $300 PC barely able to run SSH). At best you save the Apple premium (let's say 20%), but there's still a cost for a second unit, and you should consider it part of the cost of doing business.
>And, even if I have a full closet of old computers (I do) that doesn't mean I find it enjoyable to switch back to old hardware for a week or more, when the alternative is somebody coming to me within a day to fix it on site
Who said anything about "old hardware"? Your backup should just as well be a twin machine to your main driver, that you buy in pairs as backup.
This all is common (and obvious) practice for businesses -- who buy spare PCs, or lease their equipment and can have new ones on demand. It should also be common practice for an individual developer/designer/pro computer user working in an one-man-shop.
But let's pretend good support contracts don't exist because if it's not Apple it must not be real... If I'm going to pay the full price for duplicate hardware, I may as well wait until the day it breaks then walk into an Apple store and buy whatever they have in stock at the moment. I'll be walking down to the Apple store to get the broken one fixed anyway, won't I? And on the off chance that the computer never breaks I've just saved myself $2k that I can use to buy a bunch of cocaine and throw a party to celebrate reliable consumer hardware. That sounds like a lot more fun than owning twinned computers, no? You're invited.
If I lost my laptop, then yes, I would bite the bullet and buy a new one.
If I need some trivial issue to be fixed by replacing part of the panel, I shouldn't have to go buy a new one to use for one week.
Has HN forgotten that some folks don't have the resources we do (now).
When I first got in the game, I had only one machine for like three years. I was super happy Dell came onsite to swap the laptop main board (c2001). I couldn't afford a second box and for sure couldn't afford a three week delay.
Apple, with all that cash, should be able to deliver a similar experience.
Not many tasks require high end hardware
This may be an unpopular opinion, and I don't mean to sound dismissive or suggest that waiting 3 weeks is normal, but I do think it is incredibly unprofessional to rely on a single device like that for work. If it's truly an indispensable part of your job, you should have a backup--that goes for anything, not just computers. It could be a 10-year-old hand-me-down or a cheapo Chromebook, but you should have a backup plan.
> Other brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo) offer on-site same day repair service. They send someone to your location and if they can't fix it on site, they'll give you a replacement/loaner. For me, that service is well worth the cost. If only Apple would offer that.
When I was first getting started as a programmer, I made most of my income by doing tech support, rather than actual programming. A large percentage of the cases were people hiring me to deal with the likes of HP, Dell, and Lenovo because their "on-site same day repair services" were absolute garbage about 50% of the time. You could get a laptop with a DoA hard drive, but they'd refuse to replace it unless it failed their specific check, which was always inadequate. It was normal to argue with them for 6+ hours about it. You could put a fresh drive in to demonstrate that the issue was gone, but they'd still refuse to do anything. It wouldn't matter if it BSODed consistently with a fresh installation on their drive but not on the drive I was using for testing, or if the SMART results were the worst I'd ever seen--no test fail, no replacement.
> IFAIK Apple does not offer such service (unless you have >50 devices).
It varies widely depending on location. If you go to a large, busy Apple store, they tend to have a lot more parts on-hand; it doesn't need to be in Silicon Valley as long as it's big. If they need to order parts, they'll give you the option to hold onto your device until the parts arrive. I've gotten apologies when a repair took longer than 24 hours. I tend to prefer the Microsoft store method, though: when I've had issues with Surface-series devices, they've never attempted to repair it there; they just hand me a new one. It's hard to beat that. (I guess Apple's approach is better if you need to recover your data, but I never save anything valuable on a single device.)