People want a hard disk drive to last between 5 and 10 years, up to the point it has become obsolete.
Then they need to make backups, because how many will last that long is anybody's guess. Many will, some won't, and you don't know who's will and won't, at the point of purchase. Even those Hitachis Blackblaze had failed, however lower in rate over time. It costs less to prepare for that chance, generally, than to try to pick up the pieces later. Also, while they didn't graph it over time, they had a large difference between individual models, not merely brands.
When somebody buys an intel CPU he doesn't expect the CPU to only last 3 years, or when someone buys a laptop with 1 year warranty he doesn't expect to throw it away after one year.
No, but it happens anyway. CPUs basically don't die, without being in a harsh environment like a large datacenter. The thing is, you're harping on warranty, which is a pure business decision, weighing costs of the warranty, and PR/sales impact of changing the warranty, not anything to do with the product quality. The cost of servicing the base warranty is built in to each product's cost. The cost of servicing longer warranties is built in to the added cost of those warranties.
If you get a Compaq craptop with a 1-year warranty, and it dies after a year, you got what you paid for. If you bought a Probook with a 1-year warranty and it does after a year, you were unlucky.
This is why this discussion is important. And all things considering, I find Seagate drives to be terribly expensive. And I'm not even factoring in recovery/downtime/availability.
How so? They have 1-year retail warranties, and 2-year OEM warranties, now. Even with a longer warranty, if you have to use the warranty, you have the same downtime and recovery issues as if you didn't have the warranty. All that changes is the cost of a replacement drive going from $70+ to the cost of postage.