An Update on AppleCare One versus Best Buy Total

I performed some back-of-the-napkin math on how great BestBuy Total is for $179 a year in a previous post. I’m expecting they raise their prices to $249 for people like me such as maybe “Total Unlimited” being a new tier for people who have more than 5 AppleCare covered devices at once which I greatly exceed.

Since my post, someone has put together, “iCare —  AppleCare Plan Calculator” which lets you determine whether you could benefit from AppleCare One.

Above is a break down of Apple Care Coverage for every device I own. I can spend $97.86 a month for CareOne or pay separately $99.84 a month to cover everything. This calculator suggests actually covering 6 devices with AppleCare One and spending an additional $25.90 a month to cover the cheaper devices like Apple Watch, HomePod, AppleTV and AirPods which is a great suggestion.

Best case, that’s $766.32 a year to cover all of my devices through Apple.

Alternatively, I can just pay Best Buy $179 a year for the same coverage.

There’s one big caveat, BestBuy only covers my devices for 2 years from purchase date and AppleCare One is basically forever (up until vintage status) and you can add devices you purchased up to 4 years ago with an inspection at the Apple Store where BestBuy requires you buy it from them but I’d also advocate starting to do that now because BestBuy is going to be cheaper than Apple.com every day of the week. You’ll never pay full price so I’ve basically stopped buying from Apple.com for anything but BTO Macs with over 1TB of storage.

Another Caveat is that Apple Care One only supports devices you’re logged into with your AppleID where BestBuy doesn’t care. Even devices I’ve purchased for family as gifts get AppleCare attached from time of purchase no matter who ends up using the device so that’s another plus for BestBuy Total.