This is ridiculous.<p>The sales person sold you a part Apple included for free, and you're saying it's Apple's fault?<p>Hard drives die - it's a fact of life. If you didn't have a backup how is that Apple's fault?<p>Saying "no BIOS, no keyboard shortcuts" shows how little you know. Simply holding down the mouse button while a mac starts up will eject anything in the optical drive, as will pressing the eject button on any Apple Keyboard, once the device is on (i.e. in this case, the EFI is loaded and it's at a grey screen because it can't find any OS)
Ram failure? May well be PBCK - last month I bought 8 GB RAM, tried to install it in my MBP, got the 3 beeps, said "bleeping newegg", put the old 4GB of RAM back in, used the MBP for a while, got annoyed because it was now quite slow, managed to look at System Profile, saw I now had only 2 GB, said "Hmm...", reseated the RAM, now had 4GB, removed it, and tried again with the new 8GB, and lo and behold, the PBCK was solved...<p>I've never had a Mac Mini, but I wouldn't be surprised if the RAM installation process there is as tight as for the MBP.
Sure, one guys experience with a single Mac Mini is absolutely the basis for general statements regarding Apple hardware.<p>Especially when we are treated with such insight as the use of the "Death Star" moniker for Hitachi drives (a name given for a faulty production run circa 2004, an aeon ago in computer times) and the fact that Mac Mini's don't have a physical cd rom eject button.<p>Because, you know, there aren't tens of millions of satisfied users of said firm's hardware around, and the firm doesn't top computer user satisfaction surveys for 6-7 years in a row. And it's not like most alpha geeks, and around 70% of all hacker conference attendants use said firm's hardware (with a few even known to prefer to use the hardware even to run an alternative OS, like Linux, instead of a PC, because they consider it top notch).