Or are they just another useless upsell?
Have mercy on retail clerks. To keep their jobs, they’re often asked to push promotions they know most customers don’t want, such as memberships and credit cards. Upselling looks good on a manager’s ledger, even if it irritates a good portion of their customers.
If you’ve been shopping for smart TVs, laptops or just about any major piece of electronics in the past decade, you’ve no doubt been pitched on the idea of an extended warranty, AppleCare+ and Best Buy Protection being a couple of familiar examples. At a glance, they’re more reasonable than most in-store promotions. Everything breaks eventually, and the cost of some repairs can be eye-watering. Just ask anyone who’s smashed the display on their MacBook.
Despite this, you can safely skip an extended warranty in most circumstances. They mostly exist for the sake of an upsell, which you can tell by the strings attached and the fundamental nature of consumer electronics. When an extended plan is justified, you’ll likely know before you walk in the door.
Why extended warranties are usually a waste of money
For starters, extended warranties are typically focused around defects, and any TV, laptop or similarly expensive device is likely to be covered by the manufacturer for 90 days to a year or more. This matters because if a product is defective, it’s going to fail under relatively normal strain, by definition. You’re liable to find out quickly if it’s faulty, though there are obviously outliers.
Another point is that while planned obsolescence is real, a product that survives the first year is likely to survive past the two- or three-year window that’s common for many extended warranties. In an accelerated longevity test by RTINGS, 102 TVs were run nonstop between November 2022 and September 2025. Only two actually failed before they reached 3,000 hours, and most made it to at least 8,000. This longevity test employed TVs that had already been used for hundreds of hours, so the results didn’t show an initial spike for models that failed right away — a spike that would be present if the TVs were all brand-new. But again, those failures often are covered by the manufacturer and wouldn’t require an extended warranty. If you watched TV for four hours a day, every day, it would take you over two years to reach that 3,000-hour mark, by which point just 2 percent of the TVs had failed.
Unbiased reliability figures are harder to come by for laptops, but it almost doesn’t matter for a couple of reasons. The first is that planned obsolescence factor. Within two or three years, just about any device you buy — especially a laptop — is going to be supplanted by something with improved performance for a similar price. Meanwhile, equivalent products are going to become cheaper and cheaper, especially if you’re willing to buy a used or refurbished model.
That factors into the second point, which is the cost of an extended warranty vs. just saving up for a replacement or repair. To cover a $1,300 TV, for example, Best Buy charges approximately $160 for two years of Geek Squad TV Protection, and $280 for five years. While the cost of replacing the display panel could vastly exceed either sum, the retailer estimates that other repairs will typically fall between $255 and $395. You could spend most or all of the cost of a repair on a warranty you may never use, and you’ll still be stuck with old hardware if you successfully pursue a claim.
Some warranties include loopholes, on that note. We can’t make blanket statements, but it’s important to watch out for clauses that prevent you from seeking repairs if there are signs of liquid exposure or anything else that could be branded user error, regardless of whether it’s theuse a manufacturer’s warranty first if it’s still in effect, Geek Squad Protection being a prime example
When does an extended warranty actually make sense?
Though TVs are rarely mission-critical, there are professionals who simply can’t afford any downtime with a laptop or other productivity tools, and put the equipment they own through the wringer. The cost of an extended warranty is nothing by comparison, though if you’re in this camp, it’s essential that you pick a plan that allows for loaner units or rapid repairs or replacements. In fact, you may be looking at special business-oriented warranties that aren’t pitched over the checkout counter.
If you hate the idea of downtime but you’re not necessarily a professional, it can make sense to invest in a plan like AppleCare+. That incorporates theft and loss replacements for some devices and vastly reduced prices for fixing accidental damage, including liquids. Considering that many cities have an Apple Store or at least an authorized service site, same-day repairs and replacements are a real possibility.
Unfortunately, most vendors don’t have such an extensive support network. If you need a repair, there’s a strong chance your device is going to be shipped to a depot in another city, then back a few days later. And they may ship it back unrepaired if they can’t replicate the issue you reported — something we’ve experienced directly. Every warranty is a gamble, in that respect.
