It's clear to me that one's data is much more important than the hardware it's on. While I wouldn't have been happy paying $341 to restore the machine to a working state, the pain would have been OK. If I get another couple years out of this laptop, I'll be ready to buy a new one.

While I think of backups after changing spreadsheets and such, I forgot about the emails and even browser history files that I rely on. My "Time Machine" was 10 days old when the hard drive committed seppuku. I'll try to do backups no less often than every couple days.

AppleCare makes money for Apple and I'm willing to accept the odds.

And I have to agree with Scott that laptops are much more likely to die that desktops.