Awesome experience:
When the latch in my 17" MPB broke, I didn't call on it for a month - during which time my AppleCare (which I didn't buy, it was just the first year) expired. The guy I talked to at Apple says to me, the gist of it, 'To fix it we'll have to replace the whole lid or screen [or something else, I forget] and it will cost a substantial sum of money.' He says it's of course covered by AppleCare, and when I tell him I think it ran out he looks me up, and says 'oh, you ran out two weeks ago... we'll send the box right out and mail it in.' I had it back in like 10 days, no charge.
Fair-to-middlin' experience:
My parents have a 2007 or so 20" iMac - which a year after using starts having all kinds of crazy/screwball/doesn't bode-well-for-a-home-based-business problems. Crashing, freezing, dog slow, etc etc. We ran around the ring with Apple support for about 8 months, and found out later they likely did know what was wrong with it - since the Genius I overheard telling another Genius "Yes, the problems fits with the model, and it is a known problem." They replaced the spine, which fixed the problem, and all were very friendly and courteous about it, but it took many, many trips to the Apple store >60 miles away) and a ship back to Apple - all at at least two weeks wait each time. A couple of those visits were to some nitwit Apple service place (The "Mac Shack" in Perinton, NY if you guys are reading) who were at times rude and always unpleasant. That's not Apple's fault, but added to the frustration. The computer itself has been great, software-wise.
relatively nice experience:
Following the triumphal return and resolving of the problem mentioned above, Apple gave a free upgrade on the Mouse, simply because I complained about the rollerball. The mouse still worked fine, and they replaced it anyway with an upgrade. So, not bad.
