I had one of those early 2011 Macbook Pros that had the overheating GPU problem.
That overheating problem was well known, and it took a long time for Apple to recognize the problem and issue a repair order. It was long enough that the AppleCare expired for those who got the MBP right after release, like me.
Because the problem was really bad (logic board replacements had the same issue, and the problem would recur within a couple of months) that a lot of people who had bricked MBP's disposed of them, sometimes at a heavy loss.
I was lucky I didn't throw my bricked MBP in the bin, so when the repair order finally arrived months after my MBP bricked, I was able to get it fixed. I had switched to Windows in that time, and I ended up unloading it to a friend of mine (with full disclosures of its lineage).
I own a second hand Macbook, it has an issue with the screen and a slow harddrive, I am not fixing it because I do not use it anymore (I never liked laptops and this was the cheapest way I could test on a Mac at that time).
If Apple had it's way in future in a similar scenario, I could not fix it locally and cheap or the working parts could not be reused to fix other people devices.
I had a laptop that broke before(my fault), I went with it at shop and the motherboard needed to be replaced, I did not want to spend money on that but I could sell to them my remaining working components if I wanted too(screen and RAM) I did that and I still have somewhere the CPU,motherboard and the rest of the components.
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