The Brunch Table

…photos coming soon.

Here’s one of my favorites:

It’s not very well advertised at all, but Apple has a three-month worldwide warranty on any repair performed at an Apple-certified repair shop. This is completely separate from Applecare–it applies to any Mac you bring in, no matter how old. If the same problem recurs within three months, you can show your original receipt at a new repair shop, even in another country, and get it fixed for free. (Apple has a global repair database for verifying these things, apparently.) Any damage done to your Mac by the repair shop is also covered.

This would have been good to know back in April, when I first took my busted Powerbook to a friendly but incompetent (that’s what Napoleon says we should assume, right?) shop in The Hague. I’ve since learned that Apple’s policy has some interesting positive side effects:

• First, if you live in a place with more than one Apple repair joint, and you’re not getting good service at one shop, you can get a competitor to re-do the job for free.

• Second, if you do give up and take the computer somewhere else (in my case, to the very nice MacHouse in Amsterdam), you get better treatment–after all, the new shop now has a chance to poach someone else’s customer.

• Third, and best of all, since Apple will cover the cost of the do-over, the new shop doesn’t have the same incentive to cheat on repairs.

For me, the third time was the charm–a visit to the Toronto Apple Store revealed that the original shop in The Hague had damaged my Powerbook’s LCD panel while replacing its inverter board (handily turning a $200 repair into a $900 repair–you decide, incompetence or malice?).

It’s a shame Apple keeps this policy so quiet, presumably to cut down on the number of claims. I’m a confirmed agnostic, and there’s a lot I don’t like about their desktop products. But when it comes to precious, breakable laptops, the repair coverage is great stuff.

Nobody around these parts could tell me why the U.S. and Canada share the same country code. I mean, today, the actual phone systems certainly aren’t integrated–foreign companies are locked out of Canada, while there are no such restrictions in the U.S.; long-distance and cellphone billing work pretty differently too. So why do we both have that +1? Because of these guys:

The one on the left is Alexander Graham Bell, and on the right is his dad Melville. The Bell family emigrated from Scotland to Canada, and Melville stayed behind when A.G. moved to the U.S. When AT&T was founded, Melville ran its Canadian branch, Bell Canada, which remained part of AT&T until its antitrust breakup in 1956.