Owners of the iPhone 4 who purchased it on or shortly after launch date will have their factory warranties expire soon, as the standard warranties on most Apple products—the iPhone included—last for about a year before they expire. iPhone 4 owners can check the status of their warranty and when it is due to expire by entering the iPhone’s serial number at selfsolve.apple.com.

If you’ll sleep better knowing you have AppleCare coverage, don’t let me persuade you otherwise. The degree of risk one is comfortable assuming is a personal judgement call with no right or wrong conclusions, and statistical probabilities notwithstanding, with any mass-produced product there will always be a percentage of lemon units.

A hard drive failure is one of the most painful problems than can affect your computer. Sadly, Apple has identified that a “very small” percentage of MacBooks sold between May 2006 and the end of 2007 are exhibiting higher than normal hard drive failure rates. If you have one of these MacBooks, drop everything and backup your data. The identifying symptom of this problem, hard drive failure, is booting to a flashing question mark instead of OS X.

I was not able to find exact numbers for how many products Apple ships that are DOA, but if I had to venture a guess, it would be around 1%. Here is what you should do if it happens to you.

Consider what Apple’s sales and refunds policy says on DOA products…