On Monday night, I noticed that my iPad had developed a crack in the middle of the left bezel.  I’ve had the iPad since summer of 2020, and it’s been fine.  I don’t know where it came from.  Obviously some sort of reaction to an impact, but I don’t recall it falling on the floor around that time.  So its existence was a surprise.

I started planning a trip to the Apple store where I was going to file a claim under AppleCare+, as it was still active on the iPad until June 2022.  That’s rough because my wife and I both work full time, and we have just one car.  So I was sitting there trying to work our schedule, and remembered the Support app on Apple devices.  I looked in there,  and realized you can start a repair claim on AppleCare+ for a broken screen directly from the app.

So I did that.  Found out it wold cost me a total of $50 to get a new version of my iPad (it might be a refurb, they were a bit vague on that).  It certainly seemed new out of the box, anyway.   They put a temp hold charge on your credit card for the full price of the thing, which isn’t a big surprise.  You expect that.

The new iPad got here Wed morning, and I set to update it.  Apple has gotten really good at moving your data from one device to another by now.  The process was always relatively easy, but now it was even simpler.  I got asked my Apple ID password and my store password, so it could grab the backup, but mostly did everything on its own.   The remainder of AppleCare was transferred to the new device, and I was asked in the middle of the setup if I wanted this new iPad to be my main iPad.  Said yes, and it acted like the “home device” (of sorts).

Once I got everything up and running – and checked it all out, I wiped my old iPad, put it in the box that the new one came with, and got it ready. This morning I dropped it off at a Fedex box, and it’s back on its way – I want that large temp hold taken off my card.  ha.

But seriously – I was really impressed with the ease of making a claim, receiving a new device, and copying of all my data over to the new iPad. I already knew the process was smooth, but it’s gotten even easier since the last time I had to this a few years back.  Kudos to Apple for that.