i'm interested in becoming an apple certified macintosh technician, and am thinking about purchasing the applecare technician training at the student price of $239.
does anyone have thoughts, experience, or even have the certification?
what's the training like if i do it online?
In my opinion, the program is severely overpriced.
The AppleCare Technician Training package ($240 street, $299 from Apple), like the AppleCare package itself, contains only one item of value: a slip of paper with a serial number. That number gets you access to Apple's web-based training materials (which are very good) and their online collection of model-specific repair guides (which I find to be the most valuable part of the offering), FOR ONE YEAR.
You study the training materials until you feel confident, then you spring for the certification tests. For your initial certification, you have to take the tests in person at a Prometric training center; for recertification, you can take them online. The live tests run $150 each; when I certified, three were required. The online tests run $50 each; most years I have recertified, two were required. Recertification is required EVERY YEAR.
To sum up, your first year's certification will cost you $690, and subsequent years will run $340. For independent technicians, that's quite a chunk of change.
And the certification is all you get. (You even have to pester them for the wall certificate they promise to send out automatically -- at least that's been my experience for the past three years.)
You used to get copies of Apple Hardware Test for all current machines -- not any more. You don't get access to Apple repair parts (hello, eBay). You don't get phone consultations for knotty problems. And despite the AppleCare in the title, you don't get authorization to perform warranty work -- that is, you can perform all the warranty work you like, but no one will reimburse you for it. If you want all these things, you have to become an Apple Authorized Service Provider. And, according to a notice I just discovered at their website, Apple is no longer "accepting reseller or service provider applications in the United States." Somehow, I'm not surprised.
And due to recent Apple product directions, the repair business is drying up, at least for the non-urban independent technician. Used to be you could economically replace an LCD panel for a customer who dropped his laptop -- now, the only "Apple-approved" repair method is to replace the whole upper half of the laptop, making a whole new machine significantly more attractive instead. And the recent Retina MacBook Pro, with its soldered-in memory and irreplaceable battery, suggests that Apple may be pushing the "replace, don't repair" paradigm even harder in the future.
Sorry to sound like such a downer, but that's been my experience.
