MacBooks are great machines, but once you need repairs for a fairly new one, you'd better hope you sprung for Apple Care.<p>I recently had a MacBook that wouldn't start. I'm decent with computer repair and have a modest background in it, but let the safety screws dissuade me from opening it.<p>I brought it to a repair store where they said it had water damage, which was what I anticipated. I'm guessing they saw that the humidity dots had been triggered, which were probably due to my laptop being in humid conditions at some point beforehand, as I think the water just barely got into a port via condensation from a nearby object.<p>They called back saying that the water damage repair would come to $850 level, as they observed "significant corrosion" inside the chassis. That's maybe just under a third of what the machine costs retail, but there's not really another option at this point.<p>Then I got it back, with all of my data in place, which struck me as odd - anything of value is soldered onto the mainboard. If there were "significant corrosion", everything would have been trashed, and the repair probably would have been much more expensive. They definitely weren't going to migrate data from the old mainboard to a new one for free, as that's a whole other racket that's enabled through these monolithically architectured machines.<p>At the end of the day, I felt kind of ripped off and knew that if something like this were to happen again, I had no other recourse other than to give it a shot on my own. Given how clumsy I tend to be, that'll probably happen sooner rather than later, so I kind of see my machine as a liability at this point.<p>I think I'm going to give the Framework laptop a shot, though I'll miss MacOS.<p>PS: Had a really good time repairing a friend's 2012 MBP recently, though. With a replacement SSD, new battery, and another stick of ram, it feels like a capable machine without too much time or money sunk into it.