This week we experienced some sadness, as my wife, Mrs. Havasnak, lost a dear friend.

Well, temporarily, at least.

You see, the hard drive in her Macbook began ticking ominously, and then completely died. After the initial freakout, I assured her that she would be ok, as soon as we could get to the Apple store for a new hard drive.

Why so calm on my part, you may ask?

We use a Time Capsule from Apple for backup storage as well as our wireless broadband router.

Now, some may dismiss this as an extremely overpriced solution, compared to configuring a much cheaper router and a network hard drive, but I submit that there is an additional value not accounted for yet: supreme convenience.

While we did have to wait until after Thanksgiving to get to the Apple store, once there, they removed her battery and checked her serial number.  Our Apple Genius then informed us that the hard drive replacement would be covered by warranty (thank YOU AppleCare!). Additionally, he notice that the keyboard area of her computer was chipped and asked us if we could wait a few minutes more while they fixed that.

Again, no out of pocket.

While you may think that THAT was the convenience, you would be mistaken.

The convenience came when we got home and plugged the laptop directly into the Time Capsule and recreated her disk image from her last backup (no more than one hour prior to the crash).

It took about an hour and a half (and an iTunes reinstall) and she was back in business.

I love technology, I just don’t love fixing it.