I just had to respond to this even though it's a stupid, dead issue to me.
First, the reason for Apple care is that the bean counters and engineers at Apple have perfected industrial design to such an extreme that they know the parts are really only going to last about a year. That's how they're designed, and it saves Apple probably billions of dollars a year. The purpose of an extended warranty(i.e., Apple Care) is typically to just suck money out of people if the products are designed to be robust. Ask any financial expert of extended warranties pay off and they'll tell you no. Then there's Apple. Milking the engineering down to a point where they know more will fail. Then you come into the store saying "my perfect phone that has never been dropped or scratched is suddently broken at 13 months"! "You should have bought Apple Care". Yeah, now I know I should because it's a built in cost to have a product that is worth a ****. It's going to fail. It was designed to fail.
Second, because it was designed to fail, they know there will be millions and millions of people paying the refurbished swap fee after the warranty period ends, regardless of whether they have Apple Care or not.
These combined facts point to an ingenious scheme to make expendable products, maximize profit to previously unseen extremes, and just stick a big broom up the rectum of the customers in the process.
Last week the speaker for the ear broke on my iphone 4. So the speaker was broken to a point I had to use speaker phone or a bluetooth set, and the power button was broken. Those are two of the fundamental, key components on a phone that MUST work or the phone is useless. The fact that the phone didn't even last 18 months before it was rendered completely useless allows me to speak from experience on just how bad the quality really is. I have owned electronics since the first Atari came out, since I was programming Tandy 64 games when I was 10 years old, and on and on. This iPhone is the most unreliable and poor-quality piece of junk that I've ever owned, regardless of cost. When you factor in cost, it's astonishing. It really is.
The "genius" last week said that many people with Otterboxes are having power button failures due to the added heat that the button is subjected to, which as an electrical engineer I can tell you is absolutely, most certainly an unacceptable excuse. So now Apple is amassing a list of supposed excuses that they are throwing at customers to hope the customers fall in a group that makes them feel like they made a mistake, not Apple. And of course it proprietary products that cause it. Right.
Apple's a joke. I've seen it with my own eyes and I have plenty of friends who are industrial designers, some of whom work in Asia, who have explained exactly what is happening from an engineering and finance standpoint. They all say Apple is definitely the best player at milking money out of people and marketing complete and total hype. Believe what you want though. You're just another clueless fanboy.
