Projector. It's an expensive item, and one I'm likely to have for several years. The extended warranty was thrown in for free by a salesman who really wanted a sale.Video Camera. These things break easy. Thrown in almost for free, by a salesman who wanted a sale :)Most recent cellphone. Because WirelessWave have a deal where if you buy the warranty in a years time they'll take the phone back and give you it's purchase price as a credit on a new phone.

I never get AppleCare - The longest I've kept a laptop as a primary machine was 18 months. Not long enough to get of warranty & care about it.

My iPod was replaced, too, when it was under the initial warranty. I bought the extended warranty, but never actually used it before it expired.

A friend's iBook needs a new hard drive. The cost of a new drive, as well as the labor to replace it, is more than she can afford right now. I wish she would have gone for the warranty, as I had originally suggested. Heck, we've got a mutual friend willing to give her a hard drive - but an iBook G4 requires just about everything to be removed, before you can get to the HD. Neither of us are looking forward to swapping that drive.

I agree with the original sentiment though, not everything requires an extended warranty...but my Macs and iPods will always get one.

I'm on my third iPod (40GB click wheel), and it's already showing signs that I'll need a forth before the AppleCare is up (really slow boot up, increasing skipping in songs, occasionally stopping in the middle of a track and moving to the next). Likewise, A/C all but rebuilt my 1GHz AlBook after the inverter, logic board, and LCD went at about 14 months. The inverter was probably a defect in manufacturing that took a while to show, the LCD gradually gained bad pixels over time since Apple seems to like cheap panels, and the logic board was probably due to the various flexation that happens from normal laptop use.

My only non-portable Apple at the moment is a second hand Sawtooth G4, so no A/C there. I'm honestly not sure what I'll do when I finally get around to getting a MacPro. I do agree in general that *stationary* electronics are either broken from the start or darn near immortal (I *heart* my Sawtooth). On the other hand, ask the folks with the leaky G5 water coolers about the kinds of non-electronic moving parts that computers have to fail.

I guess I've got a minimum of one year to decide (and I'm definitely not buying one tomorrow. I'd be a dead man when I got home!)

iPods and Mac laptops are the only things I buy warranties on.

My iPod just died yesterday, 18 months after I bought it (and it's the third replacement one...apparently I break iPods by using them). And my iBook G4 has been great, but after my iBook G3 (you know, the Logic Board / Hinge Break iBook?), I felt compelled to buy it.

So now, instead of shelling out the 49 bucks a few months back for the iPod warranty, I've gotta buy a new one. :-\