Farmer,
I'll reiterate, there aren't any typos, I made a minor grammatical error (I mean a very significant error LOL), I used the word do instead of did. WOW, you are a genius for catching that. I did catch it, but I wanted to see how smart you were and you obviously are brilliant. LOL As far as the rest of it, you missed it completely, but you stay on top of do & did... LOL (hint: think forest and trees)
"Indeed, since you attempted to highly quality your education by mentioning a "very fine university" it is very ironic." WTF LOL
Jeff,
I do have a firm grasp on how HDs are assembled and tested, I also have a firm grasp on why manufacturers and retailers use warranties as selling tools. Most companies if not all wouldn't give a warranty if they weren't forced into it. Apple's warranty is lousy (one year limited warranty), my hard drive went south at about 14 months, but if you buy one at the retail level it's 3-5 years. Why doesn't Apple have a 2 year warranty? Obviously they don't need to, they give the min warranty they have to. One reason why I won't buy anymore Apple products.
I don't always agree with "You get what you pay for". I have an $80K SUV here that I'm not sure I got what I paid for, I have over $10K worth of Apple garbage next to me....though I have about a dozen Seagate Cheetah 15K SCSI drives next to me still working :-) Now that I think about it, I still use my Epson 1280, that has to be 10+ years old :-) That's old....
"HDs are a commodity based business with really, REALLY small margins."
Jeff, which manufacturing business (in the disposable USA) isn't a commodity business with tight margins? Do we build anything to last a very long time? Cars are built on tight margins, so are appliances, furniture and cabinetry, etc. We can't manufacturer much in this country because of tight margins.. Most products seem to be a commodity in today's world.. Sometimes it really bites us in the ass, think CD-Rs
I do know what a commodity is.. :-) And I'm not sure that all HDs fall into the category of "commodity". I believe that most products manufactured for the mass market could be considered a commodity.