If you constantly break your iPhone, this is going to be a gamechanger
If you've ever desperately needed repairs on one of your Apple devices, you've probably been faced with this dilemma: where's the nearest Apple Store? And if you don't have an Apple Store, where can you take your beloved goodies to be fixed? Starting soon, you'll truly never be far from somewhere you can get an authorized repair, as Apple and Best Buy have paired up to make this less of a concern in the future.
Apple announced that it will be joining forces with over 1,000 Best Buy stores across the country to offer authorized repairs on its wide range of product. As a result of the newly expanded tech support rollout, Best Buy's Geek Squad has been kitted out with nearly 7,600 new Apple-certified technicians who can fix that broken iPhone screen for you in the same day or help you figure out why your iPad won't turn on anymore. You'll also be able to take your old iPhones to the Best Buy locations for recycling.
“We love being there for our customers no matter what their Apple need is, from helping them choose the right device, to offering AppleCare protection and now helping fix their devices,” said Best Buy’s Trish Walker, president of services in a statement. “We’ve always enjoyed a great partnership with Apple and we’re thrilled that, together, we can better serve our customers.”
Typically, taking your defunct Apple products to an Apple Store has been your best bet to get them patched up in an expedient and trustworthy manner for consumers who care about having technicians with Apple's seal of approval handling their products. But while Apple has a fairly large network of retail stores around the country who are authorized to sell and repair official Apple products, they're still few and far between for some users. For many consumers who may live in smaller cities or even rural areas, the closest Apple Store could be hours away — if they even have one in their vicinity.
Every Best Buy store in the U.S. will be a part of the new program, which means customers in cities like Yuma, Arizona; Sioux City, Iowa; Twin Falls, Idaho; Casper, Wyoming; and Bismarck, North Dakota where the nearest stores are too far away for customers to feasibly seek out same-day service, will be able to get much more convenient assistance.
Right now, there are around 1,800 third-party authorized service providers in the U.S. alone, which is still three times more than there were around three years ago (according to Apple, anyway). With the addition of Best Buy as a partner to its fleet of official provider locations, Apple customers should only be within 20 minutes of a place they can seek help from an authorized service center.
This partnership with Best Buy will at the very least bolster the availability of Apple service providers so that anyone looking for help with their purchases will be able to seek it out from additional locations. There are plenty of places to take your products that aren't certified, but Apple won't back these places and you may not get the level of quality or craftsmanship you'd expect from the trained professionals the company sends out to stores expressly for this purpose. With a selection of new Apple products coming out every year, it's good to know that everyone's options in terms of repairs have expanded — so it's great news for everyone.
Hopefully, this new development means that waiting in long lines at the Genius Bar will slowly become a thing of the past. No one likes to spend the day trying to bring their iPod Touch back to life, after all.
