According to Consumer Reports, extended warranties are typically not worth the investment. But as Glenn Fleishman noted in a recent article for Six Colors, “extended warranties are always bad except Apple’s.” If something goes wrong with an Apple product while it is still under warranty, either the original one-year limited warranty or an extended AppleCare warranty, Apple has a generally good reputation for making things right. If you are a lawyer or other professional who depends upon your Apple devices to get your work done, you know that timely and hassle-free repairs are valuable. I’m not sure when Apple first started to sell AppleCare as an extended warranty for Apple products—I see that there is an eBay listing for a 1999 AppleCare Plan for iMac—but as a result of Apple’s good reputation, the service has grown considerably. According to estimates from Warranty Week, AppleCare is the world’s largest extended warranty program, generating over $8 billion in revenue.
Today, Apple is trying to convince even more people to use AppleCare by introducing a new extended warranty program called AppleCare One. For $19.99 a month, users can protect up to three Apple products under a single plan. Additional devices can be added for $5.99 each.
The new AppleCare One program is worth considering for your Apple devices. First, it is a better program. Second, the price may be cheaper.
How AppleCare One is better
AppleCare One offers several advantages over AppleCare+, which remains available for individual devices.
Both programs provide unlimited repairs for accidents like drops and spills, priority support from Apple when something goes wrong, service by Apple-certified technicians, and battery replacements if your battery capacity drops below 80%. And if you get extended coverage for hardware problems if they occur more than one year after your purchase.
With AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss for an iPhone, Apple replaces your iPhone if it is lost or stolen, up to twice a year. With AppleCare One, that theft and loss protection is also provided for an iPad or an Apple Watch. You can make a total of up to three claims per year. Some repairs and replacements are provided at no additional cost. For others, there is a deductible that varies by incident type, such as $15 for accidental damage to an Apple TV, $99 to repair a Mac screen, $149 for theft or loss of an iPhone, and $299 for accidental damage to a Vision Pro. But all of those deductibles are far less than what you would pay without an extended warranty.
Unlike AppleCare+, which must be purchased when you originally buy your device or for 60 days afterwards, AppleCare One gives you the ability to add products you already own that are up to four years old if they are in good condition. Unless they are headphones, in which case you have up to one year.
AppleCare One also simplifies transferring coverage when you buy a new device. If you trade in a covered product to Apple as a part of purchasing a new device (such as trading in your current iPhone to reduce the cost of a new iPhone), Apple will automatically remove your old device from your AppleCare One plan and replace it with your new device.
And because AppleCare One is a monthly service, Apple lets you use it forever. In the past, AppleCare was a three-year program that you paid for once, at the beginning. In recent years, Apple changed its policy so that if you paid monthly, the protection would continue as long as you continued to pay every month—even if more than three years passed from the purchase date. Apple is continuing this new approach with AppleCare One, so the AppleCare One extended warranty can last more than three years.
While the additional features offered by AppleCare One are modest, it is still an improved offering. So for most people, the real question will be: what does it cost, and is it worth it?
How AppleCare One may be cheaper
If you buy AppleCare+ for a single device, the cost varies based on the device. It is only $2.99 a month for an Apple Watch SE. iPhone coverage varies from $9.99/month for an iPhone 16e up to $13.99/month for an iPhone 16 Pro. And Apple Vision Pro coverage is $24.99 a month. Dan Moren of Six Colors prepared a chart with all of the different prices. (Note that he says that Apple Watch Series 10 coverage is $4.99/month, but I believe it is actually $3.99/month.)
Note also that with traditional AppleCare+, you can get a discount if you pay annually instead of monthly—you essentially pay for 10 months of coverage and get the other two months for free.
AppleCare One costs $19.99 for three devices. They must all be devices that are associated with a single Apple account, so you cannot put your iPhone, your spouse’s iPhone, and your child’s iPhone all on a single AppleCare One Plan. If you use more than three devices and you want protection for all of them, you can pay $5.99 for each additional device.
Because AppleCare One costs $19.99/month for three devices, potential savings compared to AppleCare+ depend the specific devices covered. As Apple notes in its press release announcing AppleCare One, if you currently pay for AppleCare+ coverage for an iPhone 16 Pro, an iPadPro 13-inch, and an Apple Watch Ultra, and if you pay monthly, you would pay a total of $30.97/month for three different plans, which means that the $19.99/month AppleCare One plan would be almost $11 cheaper every month. If you pay annually for those three different plans, the cost would be $309.70/year, so AppleCare One ends up being $69.82 cheaper each year (which works out to almost $5.82 a month).
But what if you own an Apple Watch SE, an iPad mini, and an iPhone 16e? Those three individual plans have a total price of $17.97, which is already less than the $19.99 AppleCare One. And if you pay annually, the price difference is even larger. As noted above, there are some advantages of AppleCare One over AppleCare+. For example, you cannot even get AppleCare+ if your current device is more than 60 days old. Even so, for many folks in this situation, AppleCare One won’t be a cheaper or better option.
The real savings come if you own an Apple Vision Pro. Monthly AppleCare+ costs $24.99 a month. But you can make an Apple Vision Pro one of your three devices in an AppleCare One plan, so you are already saving money even before you add two other devices. (This is the first time that I’ve been able to assert that spending the big bucks on a Vision Pro last year is saving me money.)
Should you get AppleCare One?
Over the years, I have often been asked whether I recommend paying Apple for an extended warranty. My answer has always been the same. It depends. I don’t recommend extended warranties from any other company, but Apple’s program tends to be worth it. You may never need to use the service, and if that happens, then I guess you might say that you didn’t need it, but you can’t predict the future. And if you do ever need it, having AppleCare coverage is typically really worth it. You just need to go with your gut.
What have I myself done? Over the decades, I have sometimes paid for AppleCare and sometimes not. There have been times when I did pay for AppleCare but never used it, so I guess in retrospect it was unnecessary, although it did give me peace of mind. There have been other times when I did pay for AppleCare, and when something went wrong, I was thrilled that I had the foresight to purchase protection. I’ve almost never purchased AppleCare for one of my iPhones, my logic being that I get a new iPhone every year and hopefully the standard limited warranty will be sufficient. But there have been times that I didn’t purchase AppleCare and I later regretted it, such as when my daughter dropped her iPhone and shattered the screen, and I realized that I had not purchased AppleCare. (Note to self: always purchase AppleCare for a mobile device used by a teenager.)
Last year, when I purchased my Vision Pro, I thought long and hard about whether to purchase AppleCare. Because that device is so incredibly expensive, and because it is a portable device that I knew I would frequently be taking on and off, I figured that there was a decent chance that I might drop it and break it one day, and I certainly didn’t want to have to pay full price for a repair—or worse yet, pay the MSRP for a full replacement. Thus, I decided to pay the monthly $24.99 cost for AppleCare+, figuring that I could decide later if I wanted to stop paying for it. I haven’t needed to use the service with my Vision Pro—and hopefully I never will—but it does give me a sense of security knowing that I have it. For me, it will be a no-brainer to pay for AppleCare One to drop my monthly fee from $24.99 to $19.99 plus get two more devices covered for no additional charge.
UPDATE: Done. It was a very simple process.
Conclusion
Apple is not a charity. While AppleCare One will be cheaper for some folks in some situations, I’m sure that Apple is only announcing this program because it believes that, overall, this new service will bring Apple additional revenue. Nevertheless, if you own three or more Apple devices and you typically consider the AppleCare extended warranty program to be a good idea, you’ll want to think about switching to AppleCare One because it might be better and/or less expensive for you. Personally, I plan to sign up for AppleCare One today.