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The one year warranty on my MacBook Pro is due to expire in a few weeks, so I’m thinking of investing in AppleCare to extend it by a further two years. AppleCare is rather expensive though, particularly for laptops - $399 (£ 279) for my model if bought from the online Apple Store.

There are a number of sellers offering the same plan for roughly half price on eBay, $199 Buy It Now. Positive feedback for these sellers is close to 100% and, as AppleCare is a worldwide warranty, it seems like a smart move to buy from them, rather than from Apple. Read the auctions more closely and things start to sound a little fishy though. The majority of the sellers who sell a lot of AppleCare packages provide the serial number electronically, rather than providing the retail package or any official paperwork from Apple. Only the serial number is required to activate the warranty, but surely the retail package should be available, if requested? Although the serial number provided may activate the warranty, how do we know that it wasn’t generated by a serial number generator?

I think in this case I’m going to be more prudent and pay a little bit more to buy an AppleCare plan that comes in the proper retail package - there are a number of sellers on eBay offering them and they’re also available from a number of reputable online retailers. The prices aren’t as low, but at least I’ll be more comfortable that I’m buying a legitimate product.

Yes, it’s true - I’ve switched to a Mac running OS X as my primary home workstation. For the past few years I’ve been running NetBSD on sparc64 systems, but felt that it was time for a change. Something in particular that’s really annoyed me is that Firefox still isn’t stable on 64-bit big-endian platforms - I had to resort to running it on a NetBSD/alpha system and displaying it locally.

It’s still early days, but I’m impressed with how everything Just Works under OS X. It’s not quite a traditional Unix system (NeXT always was a bit different, NetInfo for example), but a Mach kernel, a mostly-FreeBSD userland and a pretty GUI is good enough for me Of course, I’m still keeping my Ultra 60 running NetBSD as my second head - just need to get Synergy configured so that I can talk to both machines with a single keyboard and mouse.

Apple are running a trade-in scheme in South Africa - they’re offering discounts on new hardware for those who hand in their old Mac or PIII-or newer PC hardware. They also offer 75% of the discount amount if you want to keep the old machine. I’m not quite sure how they plan on collecting the old hardware if you order from the online store though…

For more info on the offer and the discounts available, see http://www.tradein.co.za/. The offer runs from February 15, 2006 until March 31, 2006 - see the Terms and Conditions for all the fine print and legalese.