Re:I wouldn't... (Score 3, Interesting)

My ibook died when out of warranty. Being a techy, I tried to troubleshoot it myself. So I tried various boot disks, resetting the pram, etc., attempting to boot to a firewire drive, even replaced the hard drive. No dice. Sent it to Apple, paid $400 and they fixed it and added a 90-day warranty. I'm pretty sure they replaced the board. If I had had AppleCare I would have just sent it to them in the beginning and saved a lot of time and frustration.