Written by Scott Johnson on
This post is part of a series we authored on another site which has since gone offline; An OSX Detour: Taking your Mac in for AppleCare was originally published on August 27th, 2009
Given the prevalence of Macs within the Rails community, I thought it acceptable to detour from the normal Rails focus of this blog and post about how to take your Mac in for AppleCare. I'm the proud owner of a 13" Intel MacBook, 2nd generation that recently had to go back for some tender loving care. Here's how I did it:
- Verify Your AppleCare. Before you do anything you should likely verify your AppleCare. Where to do this seems to vary from time to time (no consistent url) so start by checking the Apple Support site.
- Make an Appointment. You definitely want to make a Genius Bar appointment. Sure you might get lucky and not have to wait but that's unlikely. I showed up at 10:30 and the next availability without an appointment was 3:45. Yikes!
- Full Backup. Make sure you do a full Time Machine backup right before you take it in. Odds are that no data is lost but you always want to be safe.
- Service Account. Create an Adminstrator account named Service with no password and set it to default log in when the machine is turned on. Make sure that Fast User Switching is turned off.
- Log Out. Log out of your own account.
- Be Less Stupid than This Man. Hilarious!
- Custom Upgrades? Make note of the RAM and Hard Drive configuration if you made any upgrades yourself. This HAS TO BE TOLD TO APPLE when you take it in. That way if they do something drastic like a MotherBoard replacement they know to move over your hardware. This information should be noted on the receipt that Apple gives you.
Note: If Apple really wants access to your data then there's not much you can do but what you're doing here is preventing casual snooping.