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.<p>Google did a study on failure rates:
<a href="http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/" rel="nofollow">http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-exper...</a><p>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.<p>Just my opinion.