Spent £1600 on a MBP in 2008, it failed 18months later, no apple care, i took it into an apple store with a letter of intent under the sale of goods act 1984 , basically stateing that a peice of kit sold as "PRO" should be expected to last longer than 3years, let alone 18months (it was a logic board failure, had it been the harddisk, ram, superdrive or even a USB port i would not have had an issue with these being within the realm of a reasonable to expect failure, but a complete, system wide death in under 3 years in unacceptable given i have £250 notebooks that have been running for over a decade with no failures from another manufacturer)
Apples products always skirt the thermal and technological limits of the hardware, often with NO room for any slight varience other than the lab in which they were designed to run in,
Given a thermal limit of 45-65 degrees for a harddisk , apple will run it in an encloser that always skirts the 65 point, thus reducing the lifespan of the drive, all to have the case look better (iMac HDD being SLAP in the centre rather than at an edge where it could be cooled simply and be a snap to make it user replaceable)
if i cant replace the "user replaceable" parts of a computer myself, such as the HDD as a minimum, then i expect a 3 year warrenty AS MINIMUM out of the box, and a lifetime labour warrenty on replacing the HDD after that 3 year period, look at the apple recal on drives its having now, look at the GPU issue on the previous gen macbook pros, the battery issues on the macbook pros, the overheating and death of the PSUs in the 1st gen timecapsules, the overheating and self destruction of some iphone 3G phones, Yellowing screen issues on iDevices, failing screens on iMacs,
Mac products are sold under the auspices of being more reliable than other vendors equipment by the mac faithfull, i love my mac products, but they are far far less reliable than anyother computer system i have used in the last 30 years, my old Oric 1, spectrum, amstrad 6128, amiga, and several old PCs and Laptops still run as well today as they did back then, and have been treated to far worse than my modern apple products, so far the only apple product i have had, or i have know of any of my friends from having that has not had to be replaced or repaired at least once within 18months is my Apple TV and one of my friends 2nd gen iPod shuffles,
List of replacements myself and 4 friends have been and suffered:
3x Time Capsules 1stgens all three died with blown overheated PSUs between 14 and 18 months old
5x iMacs since late 2008, 1 repaired twice before being replaced(screen issue, HDD failure, Logic Board Failure and 2 more screen failures)
2x macbook pros, 1 replaced 3 times after two failed repairs (GPU issue)
3x iPhones, battery life issues on 2 3GS, screen issue on 4
Getting apple to acknowledge there was a fault was hard enough, getting them to admit it was KNOWN fault and their responsablity to fix was the WORST consumer experience i have ever had, if they desgined there products properly to have respect for the thermal limitation of the parts, rather than to try and make hermetically sealed paperweights they would produce some of the best hardware on the planet.
