AppleCare used to be vastly superior (at least in here in Australia) - you could walk in without an appointment, and service was while-you-wait. I needed some repairs to a 2007 MacBook, they offered to repair it within a couple of hours, send me an SMS when it was ready, and offer a voucher for a coffee at a nearby cafe while I waited. And if they couldn't repair it same/next day, to swap it with a replacement machine. That's the kind of service I was paying the Apple tax for, to minimize my downtime.

But it's nothing like that now. Apple is back to 1 - 2 week wait on repairs, just like the third-party repair stores before the Apple Store existed here. Much of the point of AppleCare for me - same day repairs in any major city around the world - is gone now.