Dead after 2 years 4 months, should I be angry?

Question

I posted my woes elsewhere but it's true, my hard drive is fried. I had a long chat in Japanese with an Apple Support staff and all he could do was appologize and tell me that if Apple does the repaire that it will cost apron 500 USD; he gave me the number for a couple of other companies that can repair the disk and said I should shop around.
Here's my beef: I had used a Sotec computer for 6 years without incident, leaving it on 24/7 and the cost was nominal. The iMac was 2800 USD and breaks after 2 years. Yeah, maybe I should have bought the Applecare but, honestly, if you're spending that much money on a computer don't you expect that it should be okay for 2 years? Should I be angry?
My first thought is that Apple doesn't make the hardware but then I checked a little here and read, "Because Apple makes the hardware, the operating system, and many applications, Apple products are truly integrated systems". So, whose fault is it? I leave my computer on pretty much 24/7 in an air-conditioned room; I do word processing, surfing and a good bit of FB'ing and that's it. Two years seems exteream.
Costwise I should be fine. I have two warranty options from the store I originally bought it. It just takes time; it's a trust issue, too.
So, tell me if I should be angry at Apple. I honestly won't know until I speak with the English customer service rep and hear their explanation.

Answer 1

SirWalterScott wrote:
My parents still use the tube television they bought in the late 60' in one of their guest rooms and it works just fine. It's that kind of longevity I'd like to expect from a product but this age things are too complex, they're obsolete in a much shorter time span, so I guess it makes sense that it could die in two years.
A lot of it has to do with consumer demand for inexpensive products, especially high tech ones. I have some old "enterprise class" 2 GB SCSI hard drives that probably will outlast any of the SATA ones in any of my current Macs. But they were insanely expensive by current standards, about $70 per GB of capacity, & maybe a tenth as fast as even the cheapest SATA drive on the market today.
Something similar applies to that old TV: in terms of resolution & picture accuracy, it probably cost several times what a contemporary one costs today.
Almost no consumer would accept that kind of price/performance ratio today; in fact, we demand that the price/performance ratio constantly improve or we just won't buy new stuff. For years Apple tried to remain totally aloof from the highly competitive commodity market this creates, & it almost killed the company: Macs lasted practically forever but became just too expensive for most people to afford.
Today, they offer very competitive price/performance ratios; & their unique combination of close hardware/software integration, user friendliness, excellent esthetics, & all the rest of it keep them from becoming just another commodity computer; but consumers still won't pay much of a premium for that, much less for the far less tangible & quite expensive benefits of very long average life expectancy.