AT&T to Begin Offering iPhone Insurance on June 6th? $13.99 Per Month Plus Deductible
Boy Genius Report claims to have received information from a source at AT&T indicating that the carrier is set to introduce a hardware insurance program for the iPhone, allowing users to protect themselves (for a relatively substantial monthly fee) against replacement costs for out-of-warranty hardware failures, as well as accidental (including liquid) damage and loss or theft. The "MobileProtect" insurance program will be set up through the App Store and then billed monthly via credit card.
AT&T will be launching a new insurance service starting June 6th, named MobileProtect, designed specifically for the Apple iPhone. The insurance plan, which will be run by Asurion, will carry a price tag of $13.99/month and will be available for purchased through Apple's App Store. The charges will be billed to the credit card on file with Apple. The deductibles range from $99 for an 8GB 3G to $199 for a 32GB 3GS, which is pretty steep - but not quite as steep as $699 for a new 32 GB 3GS off-contract.
Set to launch on June 6th, the program goes into effect just one day before Apple is expected to introduce its next-generation iPhone hardware at its Worldwide Developers Conference. Users must also register for the program within 30 days or purchasing a new iPhone, and it will not be offered retroactively to existing users.
As the report notes, $168 in insurance premiums per year appears to be a relatively steep cost, especially considering the deductibles to be charged on top of that for replacement. Its comprehensive coverage may, however, make the proposition worthwhile for some customers.
Since its 2007 launch, the iPhone has been specifically excluded from AT&T's standard Wireless Phone Insurance, which is also run by Asurion and carries substantially lower premiums and deductibles than the new iPhone-specific plan.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
