About Apple online support chat

The only online support chat for Apple is available for iMac and certain kinds of iPod owners.

You can talk directly to Apple for phone support 90 days for free, and an additional 2 years and 9 months from date of computer's purchase if you buy AppleCare for your Mac within the first year of ownership for any Mac model. The phone numbers are worldwide on this page:

http://www.apple.com/contact/phone_contacts.html

Note the purchase date would be from an authorized service center. Some factory refurbished machines can also have Applecare added to them depending on where you purchase it from, and people who currently have AppleCare, can transfer it to the new owner by calling AppleCare with the new owner's information.

Message was edited by: a brody

Also before you ask WHY this is this way, know that absolutely no one on this board knows Apple's policy or has a say in it. This is a user to user board.

I could be wrong, but I believe Apple has dropped online chat support completely, even for iMacs. At least I can no longer find any mention of it. It was only experimental and apparently didn't work out.

And just to add a bit to the information about phone support, even after the 90-day free support period and without having the AppleCare extended service plan, a user will not be charged for the support call should the problem with the system turn out to be one covered by the warranty. Having AppleCare is a good idea, though.

Interesting. It's not linked from any of the support pages that I can find, and isn't even in the Support site map. Makes me wonder if it's still even active or just a "ghost" page. Note that the page, in the "eligible product" section only lists the iMac G5, not the Intel-based iMac that they've been selling for over two years now. Clearly they're not promoting Chat as a primary support tool, if it's still working at all, as Service Chat used to be prominently mentioned on the iMac support pages.