If you’ve made room for Siri in your living room this weekend with a brand new Apple HomePod, you might want to consider getting on the line to Apple and asking about Apple Care. Or at least lining the floor immediately underneath it with bubble wrap.
It turns out the cost of repairing an out-of-warranty HomePod is a whopping £268.44. In other words, you’d be £2.53 shy of being able to buy three new Amazon Echoes for the same money.
Perhaps more importantly, you’d only be £50.56 short of buying a brand new HomePod. In any case, if you plan on moving your HomePod around a lot, it might be worth considering paying the £39 for Apple Care.
If you’re only worried about the power lead though, it’s another story. Although attached, 9to5Mac has learned that Apple will charge around £25 for a replacement, should an overeager pet decide it would rather chew through a live power cable than suffer through another listen of One Direction’s Greatest Hits.
We were quietly impressed with the HomePod when we put it through its paces last week, accepting that it had the best sound on a smart speaker to date, even if it was comparatively lacking in the smarts department. Right now, it’s young enough a product that we don’t know exactly how fragile it’ll be in the long run, but theoretically, there’s a lot less chance of things going wrong than with your iPhone or MacBook. There are just fewer things that can go wrong with an object that is seldom moved or even touched.
All the same, if you suffer from butterfingers, or have children without the spacial awareness or understanding of money to know better, you may want to take out Apple Care just in case, or at least check the fine print of your home contents insurance.
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