What can be wrong with a longer warranty?

Well, nothing, maybe. Some stores make more money selling the finance and extended warranty than they do from the product. And all warranty is not created equal.

You need to know if the warranty is from the manufacturer or provided by an insurance company. There’s a difference between the manufacturer guaranteeing your product will work for x years and an insurance company offering to repair it up to a certain value.

If the manufacturer guarantees it, you are going to have a working product pretty much regardless of the cost to them, for the period of the warranty.

An insurance company is going to make decisions based on the cost. If repairing your product costs too much, they can opt to give you a credit note to spend at the original store. They can opt to replace your product with something equivalent. All claims must be approved by the insurer.

The extended warranty does not kick in until the manufacturer’s one has run out. So you’ve really got an out-of-warranty computer that an insurance company has agreed to do something about, under certain conditions.

Now sometimes extended warranty can really pay off. If your   2 year old computer gets replaced with a brand new one, you gotta be happy, the manufacturer almost never does this. (unless you get a “dead on arrival” - one that fails within a few days of purchase) And to their credit, some extended warranty insurers have a real heart and offer to replace or credit if the parts (required to fix it) will take too long to arrive. The manufacturer would make you wait, usually.

But some manufacturer’s warranty comes with real guarantees about how quickly they will (start to) fix it. And is usually backed with guaranteed access to parts available at short notice. eg my Dell notebook has 3 years, 7 day, 4 hour on site response. So Dell will come to me within 4 hours. And I know they have a stock of parts here in Hobart.

Bottom line; Read the fine print, all warranties are NOT the same. My personal favorites are obviously Dell’s warranty, Apple’s warranty, Epson warranty and (gulp) Hardly Normal’s extended warranty.