I think that varies by customer. I wouldn’t call my experience customer centric or even close.

I had a 2015 MacBook Pro that had died recently and like you Apple Care had expired. This is my work laptop and was not be able to earn anymore income until it was operational again. I did all the basic troubleshooting myself resetting PRAM, etc and nothing helped. I contacted Apple support and they had me do the same tests and some additional ones without success. This all happened two weeks ago and due to Covid-19 the area I’m in has no in person support available. The only solution offered was to wait until Apple stores open or buy a new one.

I tried to find third party to help with no luck. I decided to take a crack at repairing myself by buying individual parts from Amazon. I soon realized this isn’t as simple as it should be. I had to buy Apple specific tools to open the MacBook case and then realized even the SSD on a 2015 MacBook Pro is a proprietary version so I had to buy a specific over priced version to replace the drive. I felt like the last thing they wanted was for the customer to try and repair the laptop.

Nothing ended up working. So, I had to buy a new one. I thought I could at least use this current MacBook Pro to get some trade in discount. Nope, they offered zero trade in since it didn’t turn on even though it was in excellent physical condition. I ended up buying a new one from Amazon and restored data from a previous timeline backup.

IMO, The least a company this wealthy could have done is offer a small discount considering the times we are in. I was very disheartened with my experience.

Sorry to hear that. I guess Covid-19 is special, and my incident was also over 5 years ago.

I hope you upgraded to a 16 inch one! Sounds like a good update anyway.

I agree. I wanted to share a bad experience. Otherwise, I have rarely needed any support from Apple in the last ten years.

I did, and it hurts looking at my previous one I loved right across from me considering the price I paid for the new one. "Well, at least I have Touch ID now" is what I keep telling myself.

I hope you didn't buy another Mac after that experience.

I didn't want to and tried using a windows based laptop for time sensitive work as I was waiting for parts to arrive. I spent more time troubleshooting getting stuff to work on a windows machine. Some tools I use and App dev work I do requires a Mac OS. Luckily, I had some savings to use but others in the same situation may not be very fortunate or even have options.

Now that I think about it, I could probably get away with a Hakintosh setup. I didn't consider it with everything going on.

It's also pretty untypical.