It sucks when hard drives fail, but it isn't that "uncommon" for drives to fail in under two years. A lot of disk manufactures only offer a 1 year warranty for a lot of their models nowadays.

Google did a study on failure rates: http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-exper...

The trick is to buy stuff with a credit card that offers warranty extensions (usually 1 year). Just call up the credit card company and they will tell you what you need to do.

I'm not an Apple fan. I have no Apple products. I have to agree with Apple on this. Hard drives fail. That's just going to happen. We, as customers, should have our files backed-up in the cloud or onto external hard drives. Failed drives can be replaced and they offered to do that for him for a reasonable charge. He has no reason to be upset. His expectations seem out of line with reality.

Just my opinion.

They wouldn't fix a dead pixel on my retina MBP even though it went out just 3 months after I purchased it!

No one can guarantee for dead-pixel-proofness, even not on arrival, and so the guarantee covers (in most cases) only 2 or 3+ dead/fixbright pixels.