I made a huge mistake, so I scammed Apple out of $2500

This happened about a year ago.

I have a 2024 MacBook Pro. Brand new was around $2500 itself, so I tried to take good care of it.

A few months in, I closed it without realizing a charging cable was sitting in the middle and apparently gave the screen internal damage, making about 1/5 of the screen unusable.

That sucked, but apparently something worse happened. Sometime around mid-2025, I woke up and tried to open my MacBook to do some work. It wouldn't turn on. The charger wouldn't even light up when I plugged it in. It was like it completely bricked. There wasn't any other damage I was aware of, so I'm not sure what happened. I brought it to an Apple store. They figured it was probably something with the logic board and shipped it for repair.

I had to pay about $800 for the repair. Sucks, but it is what it is. Cheaper than a new MacBook anywhere near that quality. At the same time, they replaced my screen! I got a 2-for-1. Great stuff.

I had gotten it back on a Friday night, when I was set to go out with some friends. I picked it up after work, came home and did the basic setup so it was all ready to go. I went out, got pretty drunk, came home, grabbed a coke zero from the fridge and prepared to watch some youtube videos on my freshly-repaired MacBook before bed.

It took about 20 minutes for me to DRUNKENLY KNOCK OVER THE ENTIRE BOTTLE all over my keyboard. It almost immediately powered off. I killed it. I basically reverted everything back to where I was before. I did the dumbest thing imaginable, right after I had just gotten everything fixed.

After a depressive sleep, what did I do? I went back to the Apple store the next day. I said "hey, I just got this fixed, and the same issue is happening, idk what happened?". They apologized and sent it back in, telling me it's a re-repair so there won't be a charge.

A few days later, I got an alert from the Apple repair center. They had found liquid damage. Shocking. Huge surprise. Who could have predicted that. And they wanted $2500 to cover it or they won't fix it, because it wasn't something there before.

So... what did I do? I called Apple. I said, essentially, "hey, this is a re-repair, it says there's liquid damage? I don't know what that's all about. I just got this back and sent it back in." Initial person was really confused. I don't blame him. He escalated it to a supervisor, who was an incredibly nice and helpful woman. She profusely apologized, said there must've been some kind of breakdown in their process, and said they'll cover it and repair it. $2500 roadblock went away. They replaced everything needed (again) and sent it back, and I paid nothing.

Lesson learned. Only thing I was worried about was that some Apple tech might've gotten chewed out. I have a friend who's a former Genius Bar employee who assured me that's unlikely, so I hope nobody did. Take care of your expensive stuff yall.