u/timon_231

I recently had a frustrating experience with a random Amazon protection plan provider. My toaster’s heating element stopped working. I expected this to be an easy replacement claim.

What ended up happening was: please upload the invoice please upload the serial number

Please share a video of the problem. hold on for 4 days “kindly follow these troubleshooting steps” post another video hold on for another week. All of this was okay at first but I had to repeatedly keep doing it over and over just to prove my side of the story. The process went on for about a month and half. 

It finally got the green light, but way more complicated than it should have been. And by the end, I was nearly about to buy a new one.  

Thing is, most of my warranty claims have been pretty straightforward, which is why this particular one really caught my nerves.

Any providers you’ve had genuinely smooth experiences with?

https://preview.redd.it/te8rkeflyw1h1.png?width=1254&format=png&auto=webp&s=f0d8a3680c05c24edcb13c8090757734e5c4bda4

I've had a Roborock S7 for 2 years and the robot itself is great. Maps the whole house, avoids socks, mops well. The problem is everything it's actually made of seems disposable.

Repairs so far:

• Cliff sensor replacement: $40
• Left wheel module after gears started grinding: $60
• Battery replacement because it couldn't even  go through  one room at once anymore: $50

So that's $150 in parts in 2 years, not counting the time spent opening it up and watching repair tutorials on YT.

When I bought it, Best Buy offered me a 3 year protection plan for $90 and I declined because “it's Roborock, it's a premium brand.” Now I'm wondering what the point of brand reputation is if the parts actually holding the whole thing together fail this fast.

Do you think this is one of the situations where extended warranties make more sense since the core device is good but the parts are clearly designed to wear out?

My brother bought an ASUS ROG Strix from Best Buy for $1,100. Declined the Geek Squad protection plan ($230) because he didn't have the budget. I kept telling him I'd cover it. 

Then motherboard died 14 months in, two months after the manufacturer warranty expired.

Repair quote: $650 because the board is soldered in and replacing it means rebuilding half the machine. Equivalent new laptop: $1,200+. The protection plan would have covered the whole thing.

He went with the new laptop, but the money wasn't even the worst part. We spent the next week and a half recovering files from the dead drive, reinstalling his entire Steam/Adobe/dev setup, redoing all his authenticator apps because he never backed up his 2FA seeds (locked out of two accounts for days), and relogging into every banking/school/work account one by one.

I know this is not how it always works but something like laptops skipping protection is pretty risky. 

Anyone else here had motherboard failures specifically? Curious if that's the most common laptop killer or if I'm just scarred from watching this happen lol.