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Originally Posted by ThePair
Echoed and dittoed. I think owners of older models can chime in here, but my impression is that these appliances usually either fail right away, or last longer than a 3 year extra warantee would cover.
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Echoed and dittoed again. You can plot the failure rate of many/most consumer items (as well as many other items). In the trade, this graph is known as the "bathtub curve", because it has a shape that looks like a bathtub - high in the beginning, while the manufacturing defects are shaking out, and high at the end as the item begins to wear out at the end of its life. In the middle, for most of the life of the product, the failure rate is quite low. Extended warranties sell you protection in this low-failure-rate middle area. And they reap enormous profits from it, since someone else takes the risk in the beginning, and the extended warranty runs out before the end-of-life failures begin.
Wikipedia will have something to say about the bathtub curve, but in the meantime, unless you have a strong suspicion that the item will fail during its mid-life, the odds say that you will lose money with an extended warranty.
Bill