In practice, Apple's warranty service isn't amazingly better than anyone else's.

I buy Dell Precision laptops running Ubuntu, with "next-day" on-site repair. It costs me a few hundred dollars for 3 years of coverage, about what I'd spend for AppleCare. Here's my experience:

- The Precision laptops do get more weird hardware failures than I'd like. Higher than one of the good Mac models, lower than some other well-known vendors.

- "Next-day" service in Vermont is usually more like a couple of days, because they often have a single technician covering Vermont and upstate New York, and they sometimes send the parts to the wrong depot.

- They really do send a technician in person to fix everything, for no extra charge.

AppleCare isn't too bad here. But the turnaround is often a lot longer unless I'm willing to travel to a big city where they have parts on hand. So Dell comes out narrowly ahead, in my experience.

If it matters, I'm enjoying the surprisingly good service from Framework on my out of warranty laptop.

So far. I know someone who had to wait a month for a battery to turn up...

Dell sends out a technician to come to your house the next day to replace parts right at your kitchen table. Pretty sure Lenovo does too.

No.

I have a high end Dell Precision 7670 with their top NBD support option. The machine has been a shit show. Dell had no parts for it when it failed and took a week to find one. The NBD support doesn't always turn up on the NBD. It's more 2-3 days, if you are lucky.

Lenovo are even worse.

I’ve never had that problem with four laptops, going all the way back to 2008.

We have about 500 of them and this is normal. You are the lucky one here.

As a decade long XPS user, I'd say dell are brilliant with support. Sure it's a bit harder to get a tech out to your home than it used to be, but still simple.

I had my XPS fans replaced just last month, in my living room, for free.

(UK)

I would assume any differences in service quality come down to regional differences too.