Perhaps, but Apple has some extremely friendly replacement policies that I personally have used (busted iBook replaced with a black macbook!) and have heard of

Perhaps, but Apple has some extremely friendly replacement policies that I personally have used (busted iBook replaced with a black macbook!) and have heard of others running into. Just the other day there was a reddit thread about this, actually: http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/eaqm5/its_this_kinda_shit_steve/ http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/eaqm5/its_this_kinda_... The points about directing people to their store over other stores and minimizing the secondary market are probably the main reasoning behind offering engraving.