By Glenn Fleishman

July 21, 2025 11:40 AM PT

Claiming warranty service on Apple accessories

One of Apple’s key selling points for decades has been its warranty service. Yes, the company has had some notable points of irritability—some of which have led to apologies or consumer lawsuit settlements—but, by and large, you don’t have to fight or fight much less hard to get your devices repaired.¹

When it comes to stuff you buy that works with Macs, iPhones, and iPads, the track record is a little murkier, partly because it’s not always clear what warranty service is available and under what terms.

Six Colors member Nathan writes in with a complaint and question about this:

I’m dealing with an iPad Magic Keyboard issue, and apparently, before I can get a repair or replacement, I need to call Apple and have them associate the iPad with the keyboard. And each iPad can only have one accessory, so I had to un-associate an Apple Pencil first.

I’ve seen online that the association should happen in the first 60 days, but nobody seemed to care, which raises the question: What is the point of this if I can just change associations whenever I want? Also, apparently, sometimes associations happen automatically?

How do you make an association? How can you tell what’s covered? And how long does coverage last?

What’s covered and how?

Because every country and some states or regions have variations in warranty requirements that Apple must conform to, I’ll cite and link to the relevant text for U.S. warranties below. However, despite using the decision tree at the Hardware Warranties page to drill down to a product, model, country/region, and even the years covered by warranty language,² the same warranty appears to apply to many countries. Where that’s not the case, Apple meets or exceeds the U.S. warranty requirements in most of the world.

This general “Apple One (1) Year Limited Warranty – Accessory” for products branded as Apple or Beats covers quite a lot of goods that function on their own: AirTags, earbuds, headphones, Apple TV, and so on. This is true, too, for Apple Pencil, Apple-branded iPad keyboards, Mac keyboards (which can also work with iPhones and iPads, of course), and mice and other input and pointing devices with the Apple name.

Where you start seeing a division in coverage is with AppleCare+. With the included warranty, defective products can be repaired or replaced at no cost, and you get 90 days of technical support beyond troubleshooting—you can get someone to talk you through migrating a Mac or installing apps on an iPad.

Pay for additional coverage with AppleCare+, and technical support extends for as long as you pay, as well as repair and replacement, plus some bonus features that are free or come with a set fee. Batteries on any device with one can be replaced at no charge when they drop below 80% capacity. The fees cover things that are your fault or someone else’s. With AppleCare+ for Mac, you can pay a flat fee to repair accidental damage: $99 for screen or case, $299 for other kinds of damage. With Apple’s AppleCare+ with Theft or Loss for iPhone (available in 18 countries), you can pay $149 to replace a phone that’s lost or stolen, up to twice in a 12-month period.

While you can buy AppleCare+ for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, as well as for Apple Display models, Apple Vision Pro, HomePod (all types), Apple TV, and “Headphones” (which includes Air Pods in earbud format), you can’t pay for it for AirTags, mice, keyboards, Apple Pencil, or iPad cases with keyboards.

However, this is where Nathan’s scenario comes in: if you buy AppleCare+, it covers certain accessories depending on the device beyond the device itself:

• Mac: Battery (if present), power adapter (if sold with the Mac³). Harkening back to the old days, any USB SuperDrive or Apple-sold add-on memory is also covered.⁴.
• iPhone, Apple and Beats audio gear: Battery and the cord that came with the device.
• Apple TV: Siri Remote and power cable.
• Apple Display: Power cord and an Apple stand or mount that you purchased at the same time.
• iPad: Battery, cable, and power adapter, plus an Apple Pencil and Apple-branded iPad keyboard.

Yes, the iPad is effectively the last device standing that has associated hardware! The footnote on the iPad AppleCare+ page about this notes, simply, “one compatible Apple Pencil, and one compatible Apple-branded iPad keyboard used with your iPad…” That lack of specificity does seem to leave a loophole through which you could own and have repaired multiple Apple Pencils and Apple iPad keyboards—but it’s also out of date with Apple’s own legal documents.

The battle of and/or

As I noted earlier, Apple keeps all its old warranties and similar legal documents available online, organizing them by the date they were in effect. This lets you harmonize your purchase date with what Apple agreed to cover. When you examine the AppleCare+ Terms and Conditions, you can go back to the July 15, 2020, to September 14, 2020, version to find this language in the list of what’s covered:

iPad (including an Apple Pencil and an Apple-branded iPad keyboard purchased for use with your iPad, referred to as “iPad Input Devices”)

That says and not or. This changes in the May 7, 2024, to June 19, 2024, T&C to:

iPad (including one Apple Pencil, one on [sic] Apple Pencil Pro, and/or one Apple-branded iPad keyboard to be used with your covered iPad, referred to as “iPad Input Devices”)

And is gone, but and/or rises: you should be able to have coverage for all three. It also doesn’t state anything about purchase or time of purchase.⁵

So Nathan was given bad advice by Apple Support. Even worse, though: The only way you can change an “assignment” to an iPad is by calling.

Extended warranties are always bad except Apple’s

There’s a consumer advocacy rule that can be stated succinctly: Never buy an extended warranty. There’s a reason for that: Most things we buy either break so soon that they are typically covered under a standard manufacturer’s warranty, or they take so long that your extended warranty expired or you’ve paid more for the extended warranty over the period until you need a repair than the actual cost of the repair.

Apple clearly sees AppleCare+ as a revenue center, or it wouldn’t offer it. At times, perhaps it has taken a loss for particular products, but I can only imagine it turns a nice profit. Certainly, Apple has been accused of developing products that are so difficult to repair, sometimes by inventing new screws or locking parts to devices—sometimes justly and sometimes not. But it’s also the case that with Apple Stores, 24-hour technical support, and mail-in service, it’s very difficult to beat the cost structure of AppleCare+.

With a switch from multi-year AppleCare+ in the United States in favor of monthly and yearly subscriptions, Apple has effectively raised the price for warranties, which used to be much cheaper when purchased in advance for two years (iPhone/iPad) or three years (Mac).⁶ The new AppleCare One plan obviates some of that cost increase. And the ability to have warranty service indefinitely also feels like it extends the value, particularly with the modest fee under warranty for repairing or replacing an item with accidental damage or covering loss or theft with mobile device plans. Multi-year plans remain available outside the United States, and are still in effect for existing subscribers in the United States.⁷

A four-year-old iPhone is somewhat more likely to die than a three-year-old one, and if there’s no damage involved, Apple replaces it. They’re using refurb models fixed from trade-ins or repairable units they swapped out. But the cost of four years of AppleCare+ at that point only then starts to tip over towards buying a comparable, excellent-condition refurb of the same model.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Update: July 22—Added details about how Apple downplays multi-year AppleCare+ plans. July 28—Updated to reflect AppleCare One and the removal of multi-year AppleCare+ in the United States.

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Jason Snell

July 15, 2025 4:00 AM PT

Next album up? Longplay comes to the Mac

I love playlists for discovering new music, but sometimes I just want to listen to an entire album. Adrian Schönig’s Longplay app, which makes it fun to browse and play favorite albums, has been a favorite of mine since it debuted on iOS in 2020. At long last, Longplay is now out for the Mac and I got to take it for an early spin.

Like the iOS app, Longplay for Mac lets you view your Apple Music collection through a mosaic of album covers, sorted in any number of ways (from Addiction for favorites to Neglect for those untouched in a long time). If you carefully craft playlists¹, you can opt to display those as well.

The Longplay miniplayer is spare and good, with playback controls and a big square for album art. (You can even opt for a Purity mode that prevents you from skipping tracks, if you’re a masochist.) And since the app is album oriented, the Up Next queue… is for entire albums rather than individual tracks.

If there’s one drawback, it’s that due to some macOS limitations, you can’t AirPlay Apple Music albums directly from the app. (The workaround is to set your Mac’s audio output to the AirPlay speaker of your choice.) That’s not ideal for me, since I often listen via AirPlay, but I used the workaround and found it a little more stable than AirPlaying from the Music app.

Perhaps the most interesting new feature in the Mac version of Longplay is its wholehearted embrace of automation. Not only does it support AppleScript and Shortcuts, but it’s got a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which means it works with AI-enabled assistants via apps like Claude and Raycast. This means that the AI can actually interact with Longplay’s scripting interface directly, using its own broad musical knowledge to build search queries, start playback, and add albums to the queue.

I tested out the MCP integration by asking the Claude app, “Can you use the Longplay app to play an album featuring a duo or group playing pop music from the 1980s?” It queried Longplay for a list of albums from my library and then started playing “Purple Rain,” while recommending a few other albums I could also consider. I told it to add “Songs from the Big Chair” to the queue, and it did so. All in all, pretty impressive—and a reminder that while Apple’s got a lot of AI integration in a lot of places these days, Apple Music isn’t one of them.

Longplay for macOS is $25, and is available on the Mac App Store and via direct purchase.

By Glenn Fleishman

July 14, 2025 9:30 AM PT

How to back up iCloud Drive and Photos

Cloud synchronization makes it easy to have a copy of your stuff everywhere, and, through optimization, to avoid filling your local storage with your least-accessed files or media, which is often the majority of those items.

But what if you want an active, up-to-date replica of these synced files? Six Colors subscriber Matthias asks:

I’d love to have a backup of my iCloud Drive/photos on my NAS. Is there any way without having a Mac constantly running in the background? If not, what would be the best way to make sure all photos are in a folder on my NAS? Just having the photos library on the share? What about iCloud Drive?

This simple question reveals the trouble with cloud-focused storage that doesn’t offer an API or other authenticated third-party access that would allow an ecosystem of products to build up around it.

The simple answer is “not exactly.” The more complicated answer is “sort of.”

Secret agents

iCloud synchronization requires a swarm of background agents or daemons that are constantly monitoring and chatting with iCloud on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Beyond the bits of code that manage keeping calendars, contacts, Health data, and other information up to date, specific agents watch for behavior that requires new syncing for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos.

Did you take a picture? Did you import or edit an image? Did you modify a file on iCloud Drive and then save it? Did someone update images in a Shared Library or an iCloud Shared Album? Has a collaborator on an iCloud-shared file made a change? Immediately or shortly after any of these and related acts, data is copied in one direction or the other.

Part of the overall background management task is to ensure you don’t run out of storage. This happens through optimization, Apple’s catchall term for dumping items from local storage that have copies safely on iCloud. There’s no particular way to tune this optimization behavior: Apple makes it available or not, and uses cues like the file or media modification date or the last time you accessed something.

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, you likely have optimized storage enabled for iCloud Photos, and there’s no way to disable it for iCloud Drive, accessible via the Files app. On a Mac, you can choose optimization for iCloud Drive files.

So this is the conundrum when you want to back up these files. On an iPhone or iPad, Apple doesn’t offer its own “first-party” to back up everything—only the stuff that isn’t stored on iCloud.¹ iMazing is one of the only third-party options that lets you pull down data that Apple doesn’t let you copy separately. But iMazing is limited to what’s on the iPhone or iPad—it can’t pull down iCloud data.

For Mac users, as long as optimization is enabled, there’s no way to locally back up files or the iCloud Photo Library in full. The only files that can be copied are the ones fully cached. If you have enough local storage, you can disable optimization and keep files and media stored on your own volumes. But that limits your cloud-stored totals to the startup volume or startup volume plus an external volume for the Photos Library, obviating one of the key advantages of having cloud storage in the first place!

Let’s consider what alternatives could let us meet Matthias’s criteria:

• Not keeping a Mac always on
• Allowing NAS or similar networked storage

A wake-up call to action

If the goal is to have an up-to-date, local, networked copy without a continuously active Mac, there are several ways to go about this. The first couple of options require enough locally attached storage to have optimization disabled, so that a complete copy of your iCloud drive, Photos library, or both is stored locally on a Mac.

Since your Mac can probably keep up with background archiving of files stored locally to a NAS over modern Wi-Fi or Ethernet, you could use archiving software that runs continuously or at frequent intervals without imposing a heavy load. Since the only items that need to be scanned for iCloud are the iCloud Drive folder and the Photos Library, that may work well enough.

Instead of keeping that Mac on all the time, you can automate its power settings via the macOS Unix command pmset, a rough abbreviation of “power management settings.”² You can enter a command in Terminal to have your Mac wake and sleep at specific intervals. If you wanted to power up and down your Mac during the day, but ensure the network sync occurred, you could schedule it to wake up for an hour every night.

To have your Mac wake or power up at 2 am each day and then shut down at 3 am, you would enter the following in Terminal, plus your administrative password when prompted:

sudo pmset repeat shutdown MTWRFSU 03:00:00 wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 02:00:00

You can make sure the schedule was set as expected by entering pmset -g sched to see:

Repeating power events:
wakepoweron at 2:00AM every day
shutdown at 3:00AM every day

(To reset this command, enter pmset repeat cancel.)

This approach has drawbacks:

• You cannot set your Mac’s Energy setting to allow sleep; having the display power down is fine. If the Mac is in sleep mode, it can’t be shut down via pmset.
• If someone is sleeping near the Mac that’s powering up daily at 2 a.m., you should mute its sound to avoid the startup chime causing a disturbance.

Cloudy with a chance of competition

You could opt out of the Apple ecosystem at least in part to achieve some or all of what you want. iCloud Photos is the bigger lift because of how deeply Apple has integrated media in its operating systems from the Photos Library and iCloud Photos. There’s no good way to back up an optimized Mac library in full, but if storage is an issue, you can relocate the Photos Library to an external volume.³ (That’s what I’ve done: I have a relatively inexpensive 2 TB SSD that uses 10 Gbps USB 3 to hold my Photos Library. It’s plenty fast for my purposes.)

Whether stored on an internal or external volume, you could use a cloning or archiving tool to copy your Photos Library to a NAS device with Arq Backup, Carbon Copy Cloner, or ChronoSync. (You can also have external volumes backed up locally or over the network using Time Machine.)

That might solve iCloud Photos for you, but what about an out-of-the-iCloud-box though for iCloud Drive: Use a competing cloud-storage system. Most cost the same or less (particularly with annual discounts) for the same storage as Apple’s iCloud+ paid tiers. And Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive have direct Finder integration. If you have enough local storage on your startup volume or an external volume—something iCloud doesn’t allow—you could use one of the backup apps above to archive files to a NAS.

However, if you have to or want to store only some of your cloud-synced files, you’re not out of luck: because Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft offer developer access for third-party apps, your NAS may already have built-in support where it can directly download a full copy of all files and keep it up to date. For instance, the popular Synology brand offers those three cloud services and pure cloud storage flavors, too.

I do wish Apple would provide an API for its cloud services, which feels against the Apple ethos but could help provide a rich ecosystem for third parties to backing up from and to iCloud.

For further reading

If you’re looking for deeper dives on the above topics, consider the following Take Control Books titles:

• My Take Control of Apple Screen and File Sharing digs into Dropbox, Google, and OneDrive as alternatives or supplements to iCloud Drive, including comparing file and folder sharing and linking options.
• Our fearless leader, Jason Snell, has a long-running title, Take Control of Photos, which tells you everything you want to know about using that app.
• For more about iCloud and its vagaries, consult Joe Kissell’s Take Control of iCloud.
• Local and networked digital storage of all kinds, including NAS, gets a good luck in Jeff Carlson’s Take Control of Digital Storage.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]