Good point. I’ll probably use it as an excuse to get my girl some stuff and take her to a movie or dinner or something. We’ve been swamped at work so it’ll be good anyway.

Excellent. I went ahead and made an appointment. I’ll update this post with the outcome.

I’ve got 2 or 3 Apple stores within reasonable distance. I’ll try and see what they can do. Hopefully I can book multiple appointments. I know years ago you couldn’t even be seen without one.

No, I was going to buy it anyway. I was just nervous that it might mean nothing or they’d say “well you got AppleCare+ and spoke to a support agent the same day, clearly you’re trying to get one over on us.” But I don’t know how it works for defects.

The phone is barely 1.5 months old. I take extremely good care of it, and half the time I have a Pixel 7 Pro on my line instead, so it doesn’t get much use. Besides, the nature of my current job prohibits any electronics from being anywhere near our work area anyway.

I’d say the phone gets maybe 2-4 hours of use a day if that, and splitting my time with my P7P, you can see that it gets basically no real use at all. It sits in a drawer mostly, unfortunately. To paint a better picture, I have to charge it every 3-4 days. Maybe 2 if it’s getting heavier than normal usage…

It would be amazing if they had the same model in stock, but back in late November/early December, stock was 1-2 months out iirc. 1TB 14PM in Deep Purple. Repairs get me nervous, but only because I had one catch fire (iPhone 4s a long long time ago lol) and with the exception of a 7 Plus years ago for work, I was on Android up until this model.

Because hypothetically, it would suck to have just purchased AppleCare+ thinking it’s an immediate necessity, and literally seconds later get the news from the support agent that actually it’s maybe not valid or correct to purchase that first, therefore your thinking shifts to “uh oh, maybe my repair can be rejected now”.

Unfortunately, it’s a 14 Pro Max in this hypothetical. I hear the back glass is a nightmare for the Pro models. Although it would make sense to point the cameras at sources of light and see if any picture degradation/artifacts creep up. See if this even affects the image output. Still, $1600 phone… shouldn’t have this issue. Ah well. I’ll google which camera is which so I can isolate the one that’s suspect.

Ah, I getcha. I used to work for a major phone company doing repairs, and they made us learn to do iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks through Apple’s certification classes at the time. Otherwise Apple wouldn’t let us touch their devices. No NDA back then though. Then we got bought out by probably the biggest third party repair/insurance company at the moment. I left not long after since life got in my way. But it was a sweet gig. I learned a lot.

By the way, are you an Apple employee? I looked at your posts and you seem extremely knowledgeable about all this. I used to fix phones, but that was years ago. IP ratings and companies sealing their phones came about as I was leaving that career field.

Gotcha. What a shame. I wonder if the phone would still retain the IP rating after this. It almost feels like I'd be "cracking its shell" if that makes sense. Although on the other hand, dust got in there already. I can't see how it would have gotten in unless it's not really air tight or it was in there from manufacturing. I'm not sure how it works so I really have no idea what I'm talking about.

What if AppleCare+ was already added? No damage in this hypothetical situation. In fact, if you took the screen protector and case off, you might think it was just pulled out of the retail packaging. You'd have to shine a bright flashlight into each lens to eventually find the tiny speck of dust sitting on one of the lenses.

Elaborate please?

There is no cracked glass in this hypothetical situation. It's literally in perfect condition, except if you shine a bright flashlight at one of the lenses, you notice a tiny speck of dust.

What if you hypothetically purchased AppleCare+ after? Then went to the store. Would they pull up your old support chat logs or issue logs?