Officially, I don't think the AppleCare Protection Plan is designed to cover accidental damage or abuse.

I did a quick search in google using the words "laptop insurance" and found a company called Safeware. To insure a laptop with them valued at $4000 or less costs between $150 and $200.

Many credit cards offer damage or theft protection for purchases made with them, so this is another option that may be available to you.

dropped...
 

As a manager of engineers, I have had several reports of "dropped" laptops from employees.

The report most relevant to FlyerTalk was when a laptop was dropped while de-planing from UA at SJC. Those of you familiar to SJC know that there are no jetways at the UA gates and that one deplanes down the portable stairs. That laptop fell from 737 door level and hit the tarmac and did not work anymore. :rolleyes:

I had another employee who was riding a motorcycle on I-880 with his Sony Viao laptop in his backpack. All the traffic suddenly stopped, and he rear-ended the car in front of him and flew over the top of the car. He landed sliding on his backpack. The Sony's case did an admirable job of sliding, and he survived with a broken leg. :eek: This is not the recommended way to get your laptop "refreshed".

The laptop was not "totalled" in that several years later when my sony laptop keyboard went crazy he gave me the keyboard from the remains of the laptop, which i am still using.


EW

That alone, particularly if you're coming up into Alameda County, should be cause for concern. All those trucks and motorcycles don't mix well :D

We have about 80 laptops in the fleet at the office, various makes although HP Compaq is the current standard. Our tech guy tells me that it is just dependent on your job how long they last - he notices that ones which do a lot of travelling by plane (and much of our business travel is actually by car) have a notably shorter lifespan. It's all that moving around, being pushed into overhead bins, etc.

We regard it as just one of those costs of doing business.

Hey, one day I broke the glass on the office photocopier ! These things happen.

I also lost several laptop keys once. Visiting client in Germany, Friday afternoon they brought cakes in, one got dropped on the keyboard, couldn't blow the crumbs out so asked for the office vacuum cleaner, which was inevitably a big, efficient Bosch model. Whoooooooo-Wham ! Four keys sucked right off up the tube. They asked if I wanted to take the vacuum out into the car park and empty it out. I declined the offer.

I have dropped my laptops too many times to count. Anything broken has always been fixable, the worst was when the screen didn't work right (half screen display) but i think that slipped in under warranty. My company started buying Dells about 4-5 years ago and those come with a full coverage policy. The Dell rep will come to wherever I am to fix something and EVERYTHING is covered, from problems to cosmetics to oh sorry, dropped it - can you replace x or y. Haven't broken anything due to dropping the dell I got two years ago, but I like having the policy to fall back on, just in case.

The strap on my Pelican case has broken twice, and each time the case crashed to the ground pretty hard. The second time, the screen on my Dell Latitude separated and didn't work. After I pressed it together again (with audible 'snaps'), it seemed to be fine and it worked again. There haven't been any problems since then.

When Joe Vacationer's out of control brats broadside your laptop bag with a luggage cart, does that qualify as a drop? :mad: The Dell survived that ok.

Dell was quite good about replacing a worn keyboard when my sound jack/mobo went... but sadly the tech goofed something and video died when he reassembled the system. However, thanks to the magic of FedEx, I had yet another new mobo, with new cpu and video chipset on Monday. And I had no choice but to take a weekend off, since somehow Dell harddrives cannot be read by many other systems.

Sadly they would not provide a new case to address all those cosmetic cracks :(