Not necessarily. A colleague of friend of mine's son (!) in Canada had a 2 year, 11 months old MacBook Pro (before unibody). He didn't have an AppleCare or anything, nor the idiot used Time Machine. He spilled wine all over his MBP and it died. He brought it to an Apple store and told them that he knows he's an idiot, and his warranty is long due, and would be happy to pay if they could just restore his hard drive for him because otherwise he would lose 3 years of data.

I'm told that the next day, he went to the store and they gave him a new, top-of-the-line 15" Unibody MacBook Pro with all his data preloaded on it. I have no way of proving that this thing actually has happened (but no reason to believe my friend was lying; as he's a respected and very honest man). This is not what always happens, but Apple is rich, and they know if they treat their customers well, they'll be customers again AND all their relatives & friends would be tempted to try Macs if they knew they could get a royal support like that. So, it's not a philanthropic thing, they do it for their business, but as they're very rich they are more generous than other manufacturers.

And just one other anecdote: another friend of mine's MacBook Pro died suddenly (no AppleCare either). Sent it to an Apple Store and they changes motherboard, RAMs and HDD free of charge.

> This is not what always happens, but Apple is rich, and they know if they treat their customers well, they'll be customers again

Yes, pretty much. And "genius" have a lot of leeway in their handling of people coming in. They generally seem expected to try and make customers happy as much as they can, and I regularly see comments about completely unreasonable replacements allowed by apple stores.