I don't know. It's infuriating what Apple gets away with in Germany. For example right now to maybe get my 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard fixed, I have to relinquish the unit for a minimum of five workdays. Mind you nobody guarantees me that they will actually do the repair within the time frame or that it will in fact be covered by the extended warranty. This is just the minimum time they will hold the unit to have a look at it and tell me what's up. Cool.

I actually just handed in my 2016 MBP and got the keyboard replaced under their extended 4 year “butterfly mishap”-warranty. The new keyboard feels so much better than the last one. Plus they also replaced the battery because it’s all soldered together, so battery life got like 50% better. It cost me nothing and they did it when I was on vacation anyway, so it wasn’t much of a nuisance. No data loss at all.

I live in Sweden but I think they sent it to Czech Republic for the replacement. Handed it in Monday evening and got it delivered to my door Tuesday the week thereafter.

All in all it was totally worth it, but I’ve only had it for a few weeks now so who knows how long it’ll last this time.

Would you take vacation the next time your laptop breaks?

I'm not an apple fan and never owned an apple laptop but, even with other brands unless you buy their enterprise models (e.g. dell latitude, lenovo thinkpad) with the appropriate warranty you won't get same day hardware support in most of Europe.

And even with onsite support with Dell I had a case when the battery died completely and the laptop could only work when plugged in, they did show up at the office, they checked it out diagnosed that the battery is dead (no kidding), and came back 2 days later with a new battery.

> unless you buy their enterprise models (e.g. dell latitude, lenovo thinkpad) with the appropriate warranty you won't get same day hardware support in most of Europe.

This is the case in the US as well, but I think it should be said that Apple is trying to compete with those classes of computer, not low end consumer grade models. I don’t know if I’d say they’re doing particularly well, but most of why Apple computers are so expensive is because they are designed to last and work well for business.

With other brands you can get 3rd party repairs done on a much quicker basis.

Heck, HP and Dell publish freely available technical manuals that you can look at and fix the device yourself.