It's ironic that when you are trained to sell warranties one of the very first things they tell you to sell is "peace of mind".
Look, I'll make this simple, before making it not simple, it's impossible for you to evaluate the value of an extended warranty, the only entity that can do that is Apple, and the reinsurance company if they have one. And while I like Apple products there is one unrelating certainty about Apple, they don't do things to lose money, hence Apple Care makes money for Apple, and probably doesn't for you.
The long version.
In order to evaluate an extended warranty as a consumer you need to know 3 things, the price of the warranty, the likelihood of a problem and the cost to repair the product. The calculation is basically, the price of repairs multiplied by the the likelihood of needing repairs. So, how often does the GPU, memory, drive, monitor, etc., fail, multiplied by the cost of repair/replacement for those failures. It's impossible to know this because we don't have access to these numbers. But, in essence, if you spend $100 for a warranty on a $2,000 product you need to get back $100 in terms of repairs for it to pay for itself, and I can tell you, without reservation that while that happens for individuals, it does not happen in the aggregate unless someone screwed up.
I sold extended warranties many years ago, so I know the retail margins (what the retailer made) for the company I worked for. It was over 50%. And that's not including the reinsurance companies and the actual insurance company itself. My guess was that for every $100 that was spent on a warranty, less than $20 came back to the buyer. Or to put it another way, if you are considering spending $100 on a warranty, give it to me, I'll give you $80 back, and we'll both come out ahead relative to buying a warranty, at least for the one's I sold. And I'm pretty sure those numbers haven't changed much.
There are other reasons to sell extended warranties besides profit. They allow a company to provide better service. Maybe you get a replacement rather than a repair, but maybe you don't. Maybe 2015 iMacs turn out to be buggy as heck because of some cheap part that we don't know about it. But my point is, you can't know that so you are being asked to make an uninformed decision.
Finally, I get the peace of mind thing, despite what I opened with. The iMac 5K is a worrisome product. They sacrificed too much to make it 5K in a tiny form factor in my opinion. I like the Mac ecosystem (have a iPhone, iPad and Macbook), and want to toss my PC, but this thing is a tough buy. If it were in a different case, with better cooling, more flexible hardware options (especially the GPU), I'd be all over it, but that isn't what it is.
So, I understand the argument, but I just wanted to make it clear that as a buyer, extended warranties are almost always a loser, and that it's impossible for a buyer to evaluate them.
