Can't buy AppleCare+ with Gift Card from Black Friday Offer

[Dcfc1884]

Hi all,

Bit of a strange one here, thought I'd check with you folk to see if anyone has had this problem before...

Bought a brand new MacBook pro 14 via Apple's website and the black Friday offer I used gave me a free £250 apple gift card that I was going to use for AppleCare+.

Mac arrived today and it's great, tried to order AppleCare+ via Apple's website and no gift card option is available to pay for it. No problemo I thought I'll just check with support

Support are telling me I can't buy AppleCare+ with a gift card as it is not a product it's insurance

So did a google and found similar experiences and the following thread on Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/macbook/comments/wdn74k
So, just want to confirm that you can just rock up to a store (in the UK) and buy AppleCare+ with a gift card? This seems a stupid way to do this but otherwise I'm just going to have to return the Macbook to Apple and buy via Amazon or what have you for £200 less and then buy AppleCare+ normally.

 

[Dcfc1884]

Managed to get the gift card amount back on the card, I now face a two hour round journey to an Apple Store so that I can buy AppleCare with a gift card….

Even the apple support people on the phone said that was the only way to get AppleCare paid for with the gift card.

 

[Likeaboss7]

If one buys AppleCare on a yearly basis paying "cash" at first, then one can use an Apple account balance or Apple Card to pay for subsequent year appplecare purchases. Went extensively up Apples chain of command and they could not point me to where in writing it gives them the authority to state verbally what apple claims is their policy. Ended up paying "cash" for the first year and calling it a day.. Guess Apple does not want customers paying for AppleCare with a "discount" in the form of a gift card.

 

[Eccentric Arcanist]

I have just been going through all of this. I wanted to use a gift card to buy AppleCare+ for my 16-inch MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro had already already purchased). You can't simply add AppleCare+ to your basket on the App Store because it requires buying a product at the same time. So then I tried following the link from system settings to buy AppleCare+. I noticed it was a different payment portal to usual on the Apple Store. To buy 3 years cover it wanted to me to enter card details (despite a card already being saved to my account) and there was no option to add a gift card. Eventually I decided to take a punt on buying the annual cover. Once again there was no option to add a gift card but it did already list the default payment method for my Appel ID. I figured there was a chance it might use account balance but I didn't want to load a £500 gift card onto my account so just as a test for the first year's payment I added £1 to my account balance. This wasn't used when when I finally made the purchase. I will try and confirm whether the account balance gets used for the next payment in a years time. Honestly, apple really needs to sort their s**t out with gift cards. None of this is mentioned in the support docs. And the online support are giving out wrong information. Gift cards are also a mess in other ways. For example, there are different limits on the number of cards you can use with a product purchase depending on whether you use the apple app versus the desktop website.