Three years ago I got a third Mac and took the plunge for a PowerBook. Though I didn’t get AppleCare, I understood its importance thanks to Murdza’s persistent reminder. Before the warranty expired, I got AppleCare as an insurance policy.
And what a fine decision that was. Second year into the AppleCare warranty (after which the original one-year warranty expired), I started to notice the bottom of the LCD screen showing some dark gradations, as if the monitor was slowly deteriorating from the bottom up. I called Apple. What followed completely exceed my expectations from a tech support stand point (having dealt with Dell frequently in the past).
The toll-free number that came with AppleCare was actually answered by a human operator. Within 5 minutes, I was already dishing out 411 about my PowerBook. Within a couple of minutes of that, a dispatch number and a case number were issued for follow up (also available online).
That same afternoon, Grace called and said someone from Apple had stopped by trying to pick up the PowerBook for repair. But since I wasn’t there, he left with me a box, some packing material and an nicely illustrated instruction on how to specifically pack the PowerBook for shipment (paid for by Apple, or should I say “pre-paid for with my AppleCare purchase”).
After I shipped the package to Apple, I expected them to take a week to go through the repair queue, perform the repair then return it. Ten days, tops, I thought. But by the fourth business day, my PowerBook was back in my hands. WOW!
It took a total of four business days for the repair, including shipping!
The PowerBook came back with a repair slip on everything that was done to it. And as expected, the LCD panel was replaced, but Apple was being nice and gave me a couple of extras:
1. Replaced the entire casing on the bottom half of the PowerBook; it didn’t look too bad before (very little chipped paints), but after the replacement, it appeared brand new.
2. They replaced the DVD drive which was making some funny sounds from time to time.
All in all, AppleCare paid for itself easily. Replacement of the LCD screen easily costs $350+. In the lifetime of any problems on a Mac, if anything goes wrong, AppleCare often saves the owner more money than the cost of the AppleCare itself.
In light of cost cutting measures to boost bottom line, many tech companies have instituted company sanctioned DIY self-service kits. Basically the customer would call the company, go through a problem-diagnosis procedure with a live tech support guy, and then they send the customer a kit to repair the specific problems.
Apple is also moving forward in that direction, but it is doing it way better than anybody else (given its excellent user-friendly processes). The new iMac G5s are made with built in self-diagnosis hardware for easy troubleshooting and replacement.
If you or know anyone who’s considered switching to the Mac but was held back because they couldn’t figure out what to do with their gazillion emails and attachments, 
And we thought 