I said I don't know but I felt better having them take care of it. They tried to sell me on their repair service and asked what warranty I would get via the technician. Not even a discount on repair service was offered. If I bought a high end appliance and the device suffered a catastrophic failure just outside of warranty I would expect them to work with me. I understand I could have purchased Apple Care but my pitch was that most manufacturers will consider covering an unusal and major failure outside of warranty, and this was only 6 days. I took the computer to the Apple Store in San Francisco and spoke to a manager there. The computer was 1 year and 6 days old and we chose to spend our money on a time machine rather than apple care, so we were 6 days out of warranty but happily had all data backed up. Took it to a technician who confirmed that the drive could not be accessed and needed replacement. The computer could no longer even locate the drive. The SSD on our MacBook Air 13" 2012 failed last weekend while the computer was dorment overnight.
So perhaps this issue is not as rare as is suggested. The technician I used also mentioned that they took care of a second Apple SSD failure today. If you compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges this statement isn't inaccurate. So the owner has to pony up the cost for parts that haven't failed just because they are soldered to the board.
With all PC notebooks, not Netbooks, the CPU and on most of them the GPU is an add-on part that can be switched over to the new main board or those parts can be replaced by themselves if they are the part that has failed. Since Apple solders the CPU and GPU, in models that have a discrete GPU, and with the Retina and Air models the RAM to the main board to replace a main board is way more expensive then replacing a main board in any other brand of PC. With the PCs they order the parts and switch them out.
When the IT department need to fix a Mac they have to take it to an Apple store and pay through the nose. It is up to the individual to chose what type they want to use, most of the time. The company I work for uses both Mac's and Win PCs notebooks. Right being that my statement Isn't Inaccurate makes it an Accurate statement.