Tyler Cowen is the latest to observe that extended warranties are a profit center for electronics retailers. The only products I buy extended warranties on these days are laptop computers—I can fix a desktop fairly readily (and usually quite cheaply, thanks to Newegg), but if anything other than a hard drive or memory bites the dust on a laptop you’re basically screwed.

Laptops tend toward the unreliable side; with heavy use and normal levels of abuse, I’m lucky to get through 12 months without some sort of failure. I’m also a complete klutz… I’ve fried two laptops with liquids over the past four years, making an accidental repair plan pretty much a necessity.

The extended warranty isn’t a complete panacea; I’ve had repaired laptops come back with the wrong power connector and the wrong motherboard (I recently sent off my Compaq V4000T for repair with an ATI Radeon X700 graphics chip, and it came back with an Intel i915GM, a decidedly inferior part). But it beats shelling out $1000+ every 18 months.