Here's What Makes Costco One Of The Best Places To Buy Apple Products

If you're in the market for a new Apple product, where you buy is worth consideration. If the product is a brand-new model, there's no real comparative shopping to be done because the price will be the same just about everywhere. At that point, the differentiators become which shop can get it to you quickest, where the best return policy is, and, potentially, what kind of financing options they have. Further into the product cycle, you can add discounts to that list, as there's an optimal time of year to buy an iPhone and an ideal time to purchase a MacBook to get the best deal.

Depending on where you live, most of the options are pretty obvious. There's the Apple Store, of course, as well as Best Buy, but there are also whatever regional electronics stores exist in your area, like P.C. Richard and Son in the northeast. Micro Center is one of the last real computer superstores with dedicated technical support, but there are only 26 locations left, and its footprint is heavily concentrated in the northeast and midwest. (Though it does have a mail-order component, many items, including many Apple products, are only available in-store.) Then there's Costco, the popular warehouse club store chain with 592 locations in the United States.

As it turns out, Costco has some extra perks that make it a particularly attractive option as an Apple retailer — ones that most authorized Apple sellers don't bundle with purchases. Let's take a look at what they are and how they work.

The most immediate reason that makes Costco uniquely attractive for buying Apple products is that its return policy is unusually generous. For electronics, including computers, smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, Costco's return window is 90 days, according to its website. It's far more forgiving than the roughly two weeks you get from the likes of Best Buy and the Apple Store. So if you want to try out an Apple product for yourself to put it through the paces the ways you would use it day to day, Costco gives you a lot more freedom.

It used to be more freedom, though: Until 2007, an open-ended, no-questions-asked return policy applied to electronics. At the time, the company told the Los Angeles Times that the unusually customer-friendly policy cost the wholesale club "literally tens of millions of dollars" each year, and eventually, it became too much.

There are some other additional benefits to buying your Apple products from Costco, though. Membership also grants customers unlimited lifetime technical support on electronics bought there and gives them a two-year warranty on each electronics purchase as well. Many major credit cards already offer the warranty benefit, but lifetime technical support is a different matter. Neither is a replacement for the now-renewable AppleCare+, especially since there are no accidental damage benefits on the credit card or Costco side, but it's still a nice perk to have in theory.