Pay the $169 and get 3 years of AppleCare. Easy.
AppleCare covers almost nothing. Any cosmetic thing they can find "out of warranty". And 3 years is not a lot for a machine that can cost up to $10k. Besides, they erase your data and it often takes weeks to fix (or even 1,5 months in case of my Macbook). They require you to give up your password (a nuisance to say the least if it doesn't boot at all to change it). And besides, there are a lot of places on earth where there is no certified Apple Dealer without a substantial drive or even flight. It just bugs me that a consumer electronic vendors have aggressively started implementing a model where it's no longer /your/ machine. You rent it, and with the flick of a switch they can brick it or decide to no longer support it. This icks me particularly because it's labeled a "Pro" machine.
None of this is true on any issue I’ve had with computers, phones or accessories. Always fast, always cover everything.
Although I would never provide a computer that wasn’t wiped that’s just good opsec and takes less than an hour to reimage anything.
Maybe it’s different in Europe. But I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with AppleCare. Except maybe for that time where they replaced a charger free of charge that literally caught fire.
Possibly. My experiences have all been from Australia.
It is AppleCare+, which is slightly better.
I just find this user hostile to be honest, they would probably lose 0 customers over publishing board schematics and making the back pop off. Now in a few years, all you have is a pile of steaming metal, with no hope of ever repairing it (for any reasonable price) after Apple decides they're done with it. It's planned obsolescence for a market that should know better: pro's. I would think twice about rolling this out in an enterprise setting or any critical piece of infrastructure. It's a toy, an expensive one at that.
EDIT: typo