The Cost of Repairing My MacBook Air

Photo credit: Håkan Dahlström, CC BY 2.0.
Last night I took my nearly three-year-old MacBook Air to our neighborhood Apple Store to meet with the Geniuses.
They told me they would fix everything wrong with it for free.
I was not expecting this. I knew I had paid for the AppleCare Protection Plan, but… I’ve paid for a lot of insurance in my life, and I never expect to get anything for free. (It’s more like “since you have insurance, this will only cost you $150.”)
I was also not expecting the Genius working with my laptop to actively dissuade me from buying a new one.
“The battery’s dying, but I was planning on getting a new laptop next spring, after y’all announce the new ones.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Oh, I know, but I’m a freelancer and it’s a tax deduction, and even after the battery’s fixed, the keyboard is all bunged up.”
“We can fix that too. For free.”

The laptop is not fixed right now, because they needed to order both the battery and the new key covers, but the idea is that sometime in the next week or so I’ll go back to the Apple Store and they’ll do both of these repairs, and after that—because I asked—my laptop should continue performing in good-as-new condition for a long time. The length of time was deliberately unspecified, but my Genius emphasized that I shouldn’t need to buy a new laptop any time soon.
Which was not what I was expecting to hear. I was ready to get the sales pitch about how laptops were going to be even bigger and better (or smaller and better) in 2017, and how they’d fix the battery now but I should really consider buying a new MacBook. I got no sales pitch at all. Nobody asked me about my peripherals, or tried to sell me on a cooling pad, or even asked if I’d installed macOS Sierra yet. (I haven’t. I will, in the next week or so, but I’m one of those “never download OS updates right away, wait for everyone else to complain about the bugs first” people.)
So yeah, it was a great visit to the Apple Store. Is that how they usually go?
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