Extended warranties ? Hell no we're not in agreement there. Electronics usually fail within the manufacturer's default warranty and if they do fail outside of it, here we have decent consumer protection laws where manufacturers don't get to not cover you after a pitiful year.
Extended warranties are a sham and unneeded.
Strange. All my electronic devices were keen on failing just days or weeks outside the standard 1-year warranty.
Plus, I don't know where you live, but surely it is not Québec. Here, standard manufacturers warranties are most commonly 1-year long, unless you buy the devices with a warranty-doubling credit card. Typical retailers (Future Shoppe, e.g.) usually don't take back your product after 30 days, as they're not legally obliged to cover manufacturer's defects. Most of them even won't help you ship the device back to the manufacturer if it fails.
@cdcastillo: Geez, even being in the medical research field, I haven't realized how much MD exchanged data by a so-called sneaker-net.
In many medical settings, wi-fi is forbidden, and since you're on the go, you can't always find a wired network. USB keys are cheap, but still 10 times more expensive than a good-quality DVD-R.
Research settings typically mix dinosaur-era storage with top-of-the line technology. I saw rows of ZIP disks, even 5.25" diskettes and the corresponding drive, gathering dust along with a same-era Mac, but still usable. I personally worked for months acquiring data from specifically encoded VHS tapes after shuffling through tens of pounds of printouts.
More recent data fills cabinets of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs,
as per journal requirements to keep data for at least 25 years.
Many researchers have a hard time trusting HDD, since they tend to fail quite early. Plus, cost of data recovery is prohibitive, and bears no guarantee of success.
Having a few illegible optical discs in a drawer isn't the end of the world. But having a dead HDD containing at least 100 DVD worth of data is serious.
Many major software we use don't get updated as much as smaller editor's. Plus, some of them being terribly expensive, we don't update them as often as new version come out. Also, when there are many computers to install, it's much more efficient to keep a local copy on DVD to hand out, just in case.
Currently, I keep all my data on internal HDD, and burn DVDs on an as-needed basis.
They have limitations, too: e.g. how do you distribute a 12GB application suite in order to install it quickly, without worrying about the media cost?
Democratization shouldn't be an absolute goal. To me, its meaning is just too close from comfort from "design by committee", a concept that is definitely un-Apple.
I believe that truly good products shouldn't have to bend to each and every requirement from the mass. If so many people bought it in the first place, they must have found it worth to get despite a few quirks. Ironing out all kind of difference isn't good.
