The Applecare Hustle
<i>In contrast, the insured often relies on a recollection of their history and a ton of emotional reasoning to decide if they will be the statistical oddity to make &quot;a profit&quot; of having bought insurance. </i><p>This isn&#x27;t generally the point of insurance.  The point of insurance is to amortise risk.  Yes, the insurance company expects to, on average, get more money from insuring my house than the cost of any damage to it.  But if something really bad happened to my house, it would cost far more than the sum of my insurance payments to fix it, and I don&#x27;t have that sort of money.  I am losing money on average, but I guarantee I will always have a house, so overall I am better off by reducing the extremeness of the worst case situations.<p>This is why I don&#x27;t buy insurance or extended warranty for anything I can pay to replace.  A company wouldn&#x27;t offer it if they didn&#x27;t expect to make money, and I can afford to replace a phone or my luggage, so I&#x27;m happy to just take the risk.  I buy home insurance because I can&#x27;t afford to replace my house and travel insurance because there are countries where emergency medical bills can bankrupt you.  The government also forces me to buy third party insurance to drive my car, which seems fair enough since I can&#x27;t afford to pay damages for someone permanently crippled from negligent driving.<p>In the case here for apple care, I&#x27;m not sure.  What apple charges for repairs almost definitely has markup, so it&#x27;s possible that they can provide insurance that averages out below the expected &quot;cost&quot; of repairs but still makes apple money.  So maybe it is actually a win-win.  Definitely makes sense to add it all up and see if you&#x27;re getting value for money.