Watching the Apple employee come to the office to repair a glued together MacBook Pro can have an extremely high entertainment value.

> Onsite repairs apply only to some iPhone models and are subject to availability in specific cities.

I wonder if it will be an actual "repair", or will they just come and give you a refurbished iPhone and transfer all your data to it.

The newer MacBooks have easy repairable battery and connectors.

True but how often is the battery the issue in an enterprise environment? In my experience devices are seldom in circulation long enough that they require a battery swap.

Port damage and clumsy or messy employees are far more likely to cause issues.

> In my experience devices are seldom in circulation long enough that they require a battery swap.

MacBooks can easily last four to six years in a corporate environment - and heavy load on the battery drastically impact it in two years.

In my experience the battery was the issue for most MacBook users.

>True but how often is the battery the issue in an enterprise environment?

Biggest issue by far. We have a fleet of 100+ MacBooks in my office and expanded batteries are probably the only thing we have that goes wrong with them. They're rock solid otherwise. The new replaceable batteries is a huge deal.

Your parent commenter mentioned connector as well. What else couldn't be repaired on-site that could be repaired off-site? I'm pretty sure anything that for anything that couldn't be repaired on-site they're just going to replace the whole computer.

Easy is probably an overstatement. iFixit describes it as:

> Battery replacements are reasonably well prioritized, if not exactly easy.

Overall it gets a 4 out of 10 [1]

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown

I was being facetious.

I have no evidence for this but I expect the experience would be similar to visiting an Apple store.

Make an appointment 2 weeks from now, go there to hand it in, return in another 2 weeks to be handed a refurbished machine with your data gone?

Sorry to say, that's not competitive with what other vendors offer as business support.

> Make an appointment 2 weeks from now, go there to hand it in, return in another 2 weeks to be handed a refurbished machine with your data gone?

Every time I've visited an Apple store with a problem I've left within 30 mins with either it fixed or a replacement.

What you're describing sounds more like the traditional Dell or HP approach!

One of the best things about Apple is being able to visit a store in almost any major city and getting your problem fixed.

Good luck getting an appointment within 4 hours at Apple stores near here. The three nearest me have no appointments until November 19.

Dell laptops I can get serviced with an onsite tech within 4 hours if I want that level of service.

Experience 1: MBA wouldn't charge battery. Machine functioned just fine on AC power. Expected maybe $300 in parts and labor, out of warranty. No, "this will be $870. Maybe we can look at getting you into a new Mac today?".

Experience 2: reproducible kernel panics on demand from GPU (later acknowledged as an issue by Apple, over a year later). Despite the tech being able to cause the panic too, "our diagnostic tool says there's no problem, nothing we can do".

Experience 3: screen adhesive delamination. "Within normal limits, expected/not abnormal behavior". That one was belatedly acknowledged by Apple, too.

My daughter's Alienware laptop had a keyboard problem. Contacted support over phone and it went nowhere. Contacted support via Twitter and after a bit of back-and-forth they scheduled a next-day on site repair in Toronto even though we live in Texas (where the computer was purchased).

I can't speak to the Apple store, but I do have years of experience with on-site repairs for both Dell and HP.

Both Dell and HP business on-site repair service is really good (though I prefer Dell to HP). Depot warranties for consumers are horrible, no matter the company. I've been advising friends and family to purchase business-oriented equipment and pay for on-site warranties (for the intended duration of the lifetime of the product). It makes life ridiculously easier.

Consumer warranties on PCs are universally awful in my experience.

If you have a more serious issue the default procedure is to just wipe the device and replace the logic board for the flat rate repair fee. I have a macbook that just shuts off randomly and turns on with CPU1 halt error messages. I bring it to the apple store and they told me flat out they don't know what is going on with the device, gotta replace. Also had macbooks with gpu issues, same deal send away wipe the device and replace the logic board and hope that fixes it. I had a macbook where the flex cable to the screen was going and same thing, wipe and send away. All they do in the store is software based solutions, they scan for hardware issues and they send it away to be repaired.

I wonder what sort of issues you had that could have been fixed in 30 minutes or what sort of replacements you've been given? That's not been my experience at all at apple stores and I've been bringing them screwed up laptops to fix for ten years. I've never been just handed a replacement laptop that day, its always been send away the computer for at least a week and they try gutting it and putting in all new parts vs troubleshooting the underlying issue and replacing the perhaps one bad component that is the root cause.

That's been my experience also. In my case the replacement wasn't even done in the same region of the country, or by Apple employees, although the turnaround was pretty quick when you take that into account.

I dumped a glass of water on a MacBook Pro keyboard earlier this year, and took it to the local Apple Store (in DC) under AppleCare+. After verifying that it in fact wouldn't boot, they told me to leave it for repair and they'd update me. I picked it up about a week later repaired.

Based on the PDF documentation I got with the pickup, they shipped it to a third-party repair shop in Houston (CSAT Solutions), which removed every part that had tripped the liquid sensor, and replaced them with new parts (logic board, touch ID board, I/O board, and "top case with battery"). The repair shop then shipped the resulting mostly-new laptop back to the Apple Store in DC, where I picked it up.

I'm not some kind of power-customer - just a normal consumer. They always say 'sorry we'll fix that' and fix it then and there or they say 'sorry can't fix it immediately we'll swap it' and I walk out with a new one in minutes. If they wanted to keep it over night I'd be extremely surprised.

You are getting macbooks swapped out at apple? I'm not a power customer either, they just take the laptop away and tell me its ready next friday. Sounds like the fixes they do then and there aren't hardware issues in your case.

I've definitely had at least a battery swapped then and there. If it's anything more than that yeah I guess they're defaulting to swapping it. I'm not complaining about the policy!

That must have been nearly 10 years ago back before they started gluing the battery to the topcase

You only need a normal consumer heat gun to detach them. It's a big hair dryer. It's not the rocket science people make it out to be. I guess they have one in the back.

Dell business support is pretty awesome in my experience, had to fix something 3 times in the past 4 years with my work precision laptop and it took less than 24h to got a technician to my house to do the swap.

Depending on the size of your business, it's easier just to have a few (or even one if you're really small) spare machines for when one breaks or is having issues. Just turn it on, restore from the latest backup and give it to the user. Then send the old one off for repair if needed.

When you click the box it seems like it applies only to iPhones