"Three of my older laptops have had their hard drives fail (with painful data loss in one instance)."

More like they deserved what they got. A four or five year old hard drive should b expected to die yesterday and full backups should be an absolute requirement. I have had plenty of drives die long before that and would never dare push a hard drive to such a long limit with no backup, especially a laptop one that is moved around a lot.

And just to top it off "hard drives" are not Apple special hardware. I have noticed that some comments have negative points, how do I vote down something (in this case the article)?