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I'm skeptical their products would get any cheaper no matter how much money they save. People have shown how much they're willing to pay, why charge less?

Pretty much unless you live in the American Southwest or the Sahara (or a similar extremely dry enviroment), there is significant risk.

Even moderate climates such as upstate New York have enough humidity in the summer to indicate a false positive on the LIS after a year or two - it happened to a friend with her Samsung phone. Never submerged, but the LIS was red anyway.

I provide AppleCare service and normal wear-and-tear don't even catch my attention. I don't kick a repair for scuffs, scratches, dents, or dings. But I've been brought:

--A MacBook that was "dropped a little." The hard drive had impacted so hard that you can hear the parts rattling around in it (I still have it);

--An iMac (Aluminum) with display problems. I opened it, found evidence of a liquid spill, and the customer's daughter confessed that her boyfriend threw a beer at it;

--A MacBook whose "case had cracked"... someone to remove the top case without referring to a manual and ripped the bottom case from its fasteners on the frame;

--A wireless keyboard that "wouldn't work." Turned it in for testing and, as it heated, water came oozing out of the battery bay.

All these people expected these incidents to be covered under the AppleCare warranty. If I'm brought a machine that isn't working due to a defect in manufacturing or the failure of an Apple- covered part, I'll do everything that needs to be done to get it fixed and the customer doesn't pay a dime (but if you've installed third-party drives or memory to which a problem is attributable, tough luck, Chuck).

But if it's drowned, dropped, or ripped apart, Apple is under no obligation to pay for user carelessness. Period.

I have never had a problem with Apple taking care of equipment I've purchased from them.

Many years ago, I packed my laptop in a briefcase that was filled to the brim. It's the only time I had ever travelled that way, and it will be the last. The case was initially snug, but after receiving more paperwork on the job, the briefcase became too full, and when I closed the lid, the external pressure cracked the LCD in several pieces. Apple replaced the screen at no cost to me, though I wouldn't have held them to doing so, and I didn't misrepresent what had happened.

A few months ago, my MacBook Pro failed to boot. Had been shutdown properly and unplugged, but on attempted restart failed to do anything. I tried the various resets I remembered, googled for other options; no joy. Dead computer. I suspected the drive was OK, and I really didn't want to lose the work I had been doing; so I removed the hard drive and installed it in a G4 tower, moved all my files over, then reassembled the laptop. Naturally, one of the tiny exterior case screws fell into the carpet while I was reassembling, never to be seen again.

The computer was, I think, obviously clean and well taken care of; but the missing screw was probably enough to void the warranty, even without any fancier patented sensors installed. Certainly suggested the computer had been opened. Even so, Apple replaced the motherboard without question under Apple Care.

Anecdotal - of course. But it's my experience, and I'll keep going to Apple until such a time as they make it not worth my while.

If enough people drop their phones in water to warrant sticking sensors in to void the warranty claims, I would have thought that demonstrates a consumer demand for waterproof devices rather than a demand for warranty voiding sensors...

In any case, I think all the phones I've ever had have got wet one way or another (2 of them soaked in sea water more than once). They all survived surprisingly well, coming back to life after being dismantled, soaked in deionised water and a couple of days drying out. The only device I've drowned which hasn't done so well is my "waterproof, nitrogen filled" Garmin eTrex Venture GPS, which turned out to not be so waterproof - it has mostly recovered, but the screen goes crazy every so often (percussive maintenance fixes it) so I think I need to dismantle it and soak it again. Oh, and a cheap waterproof Casio watch which survived many windsurfing sessions only to fill with water when I washed the car.

Apple is already happy to deny warranties based on any circumstancial evidence.

They denied a warranty claim on my wife's iBook when its hard drive got click-of-death and simply gave up. They claimed that we had spilled coffee into the laptop, and attemped to document this via "brown dots" on the metal shield on the bottom of the laptop's inner-metal liner [i.e. the exterior side, not the logic board side].

I asked them how they figured one could spill coffee against the forces of gravity from the bottom up into a laptop, and furthermore how this would prevent a hard drive from spinning up properly.

The apple store employee was livid that I would dare to question his judgement, but no matter how I pressed the issue, he simply responded with "our warranty doesn't cover your mistakes.". Never mind that hard drives are a known failure item on computers; it just happens sometimes and you get a replacement and life goes on. Not so with apple.

The actual convesration was considerably more demeaning towards me. I was reasonably tempted to commit physical assault against the guy, and it was only the fact that the conversation transpired over a phone that probably kept me out of jail.

Essentially, fuck apple.