Just to be fair, I did. Twice.
Once, the MacBook power supply failed. Took it in, handed it to the guy at the Genius Bar, he tried it out, handed me a new power supply, and wished me well.
Once, I blew out iPod headphones*. Took it in, told the greeter the line at the Genius Bar was too long for me to wait, told him I would gladly buy replacement headphones if they were available (they were not sold separately at the time), the greeter blinked, ripped open the nearest box containing an audio product, pulled out the headphones, handed them to me, and wished me well.
THAT is service.
I don't see where Mr. Blue is getting his delusions that the Genius Bar is a bunch of incompetent sociopathic sadists.
Unlike, say, Dell where I had to ship back the same notebook SIX TIMES before I got so fed up that I opened the unit, vaccuumed out the heat sink, and it worked fine afterwards.
(* - had an audio recording of the geologic sound of the Indonesian Christmas Eve Tsunami. Sub-base was incredible. Goodbye headphones.)
You said — Just to be fair, I did. Twice.
—
And I wouldn’t have any doubts to this happening to you and/or a few others...
But, then again, y’all aren’t *most* — are you?
:-)
[... and I think I could say that “a super-majority of people have never had an Apple product fail under warranty... ]
And also you said — THAT is service.
—
You bet! That’s one thing that is worth it’s weight in gold, with Apple and its products. It’s absolutely excellent...
[... any moment, now..., someone is going to come up with “the exception that proves the rule...” :-) ...]
It sure does seem like you hear of Apple Retail Stores doing people better than required more than you do them fighting them tooth and nail to do the minimum.
A friend got a plastic Macbook for graduation. It was apparently making some noise so she took it in and they messed with it. After that the noise came back and a dead pixel showed up as well. She took it in again, the Genius helping her looked at it went to the back and gave her the top of the line aluminum Macbook. Totally unnecessary but it is things like that which will convince people any extra cost is worth it to be treated well if something does go wrong.