A woman seeks advice from Reddit after a night of gaming and vodka shots with her boyfriend ends in the accidental destruction of her beloved MacBook Pro.
The couple, who have been together for over four years and have been living together for more than three, find themselves at odds over what counts as fair compensation after the mishap.
She explains that she bought her MacBook Pro in 2020 while still in university, upgrading the processor to an i7 with the hope that "this could potentially allow me to have this laptop for longer without replacing it." After graduation, she uses the laptop less frequently but still values having it around for personal use.
On a recent Friday night, her boyfriend asked to use her laptop to track his progress in a video game, saying it would be easier than using his phone. "I said sure and he set it up on the coffee table in front of him," she recalls in her post, setting the stage for what happens next.
The couple was drinking together when her boyfriend poured vodka shots and placed his in front of the laptop. "He went to go check something off the list on my laptop and he accidentally knocked the entire shot onto my laptop," she writes, describing how they scrambled to dry it off with paper towels, but the liquid had already seeped inside.
With the damage done, she decided to deal with the situation the next day. "The next day, I (mind you he didn't come with me for any of this) drove to my nearest Best Buy (25 minutes away) to see if they could fix it," she shares, adding that Best Buy referred her to an Apple Store nearly an hour further away.
She left the laptop with Apple, which estimated repairs at nearly $1,000. She says her boyfriend "initially agreed to pay" for the repairs, but things took a turn when Apple later called to say the damage was more extensive than they thought.
"Apple calls me back and says the liquid ended up seeping through to the other side and the damage was pretty extensive ($2,600 to fix) and said it's not worth fixing," she recalls, realizing that fixing the laptop would cost more than buying a new one.
Her boyfriend, feeling guilty, tried to suggest salvaging parts from the ruined device. "He was trying to suggest I bring the laptop back so he could try and salvage some parts from it to sell," she writes, but she decided against it after Apple staff told her that the laptop is "pretty much toasted" after sitting in liquid for days.
She ultimately let Apple recycle the laptop, believing there was nothing left to save. When she brought up the subject of compensation, she tried to be fair, saying: “I know my MacBook was almost 5 years old and not worth the $2,500 I initially paid, so I thought half (around $1,500 for a Pro) would be fair.”
Her boyfriend disagreed, insisting that recycling the laptop was not logical and that he could have made some money back by selling parts.
"He said I wasn't being logical when I recycled the laptop and he could have salvaged it for parts to sell and make some money and paying me for half of a new MacBook is ridiculous," she shares, expressing her frustration at his response.
She stands firm that it was her decision to make regarding the fate of her laptop. "I told him it was my decision to make and I decided to recycle it which he thought I chose deliberately so he couldn't take it apart to make some money back," she says, baffled by his reaction and choosing to walk away from the heated conversation.
Now, she's turned to Reddit to ask if she is being unreasonable or if her boyfriend is simply being stubborn. "Am I asking for too much or is my boyfriend just being annoying and stubborn?" she wonders, summing up the dilemma that has left the couple at odds.