If we must stick with a God-forsaken car metaphor, then it's more like requiring a rebuilt Buick engine, which really is sort of necessary. No one is forcing you to upgrade a clone machine, just like no one is forcing Wintel users to upgrade their 75 MHz Pentium machines to Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 4.0. You can sure try to upgrade your clone machine, but you'll need to be prepared and a bit savvy. Just don't expect free phone support from Detroit. But it sure looks fishy.
Hard drives are pretty generic.
There's no mystery to them, no new standards and practices to be worked out. I mean, if we were talking USB DVD issues, I could understand it. Hi, Fred, welcome to Macintosh. If bugs crop up in Mac OS 8.5 or in other companies' driver software, that is a problem that needs to be looked into by both Apple and hard disk driver manufacturers, and it needs to be taken very seriously. But they're just bugs, not the conspiracy suggested by Langa.