Applecare is such a waste of money. Apple pushes applecare sales harder than anything else to their floor employees. You can see the grimace on their faces when you decline it. It's just like that additional insurance they try to sell you when you rent a vehicle at Enterprise. Their whole business model is based off of how much they can sell, simply because its profitable.
Then again, I just replaced my ram, an HDD and replaced my optibay drive w/ the OEM HD. I shouldn't assume people can learn to troubleshoot their own issues and use google.