Some years back, I had a fairly pronounced string of bad-luck experiences with hardware, stuff breaking down on me all the time. Not my Apple gear, but other appliances and 3rd-party computer peripherals. One 17-inch CRT I used with my desktop PC crackled, sparked, emitted black smoke and died on me, for example. More recently, my luck has been pretty good. Not that nothing breaks, but it breaks just in time.

For example, my last Macbook Pro developed a minor screen problem–nothing big, a slight darkening in the lower corners, but I was worried that it might worsen over time. And it happened just before the 1-year warranty expired. Apple fixed it (even letting me wait until after the warranty expired for a convenient time to have the replacement done), swapping out the screen with a brand-new one. Cool. And no problems since then.

My iPhone also had some glitches a bit back, about 6 months after I got it, I think. Took it in to SoftBank, they didn’t even ask what was wrong, they just replaced it. Nice.

With my iMac, having a 24-inch screen made me nervous–if that sucker broke, it’d be expensive as hell to get fixed. So I took out an AppleCare extended warranty on it. And it worked fine, up until just now–just a month before the 3-year warranty expired. I started experiencing graphics glitches, and after a very brief phone call with Apple Support (no waiting, even for an English-speaking operator in Japan), the operator told me that he felt it was a problem with the graphics chip, and without even telling me to do a clean re-install or anything (I had not reinstalled and added Snow Leopard yet), he made an appointment to have the iMac picked up. No big hassle–we’ll just take in your computer and fix it. It’ll be out for three days, is that OK?

While I was at it, I mentioned the wireless keyboard that I gave up on a few years back. OK, he said, we’ll ship out a free replacement unit. Didn’t even ask me to test it out–heck, he didn’t even ask what was wrong with it, just like with the iPhone.

I think I’ll call in and ask them to also check out the DVD drive while they’re at it, see what happens. It hasn’t failed, but I have used it a lot and those things are notorious for limited lifetimes–and it does make a slightly funny sound nowadays.

And now I have noticed a little flicker in my current Macbook Pro screen–when I am using the lower-power graphics chip, the top part of the screen flickers black for a fraction of a second every so often. Warranty expires in November, so I have time. For that one, I’ll either ask them to wait to fix it in December as I’ll need the machine every day in school, or will take it in to the Genius Bar so they can give me a first-hand diagnosis of what might be wrong.

Call me an Apple fanboy, but I do like their service–and have been having very nice luck in the timing of what small stuff does go wrong.