There's a good chance that the hard drive manufacturer has a better (longer) warranty on your drive than Apple. There is a lot of variation in the industry, but it never hurts to check - when the occasion arises.

Optical drives, however, often don't even have a manufacturer's name on them. Either they last forever or you just replace them regularly as needed. Frequent changes in recording specs (that no one tells you about) kill more of them than hardware problems, and without a go-to mfr it can be hard to get BIOS updates that could save them.

I don't know how Apple marketed Office for Mac, but I still have a copy (probably unreadable) of the entire Word program on a single 3" floppy. A slightly more recent version of Office (Word, Excel, and Access) took a whole 7 floppies, according to my records from a while back. My first DOS machine had an enormous 30 MB hard drive as delivered. I added an aboveboard to kick the RAM up to 1.6 MB and (with some difficulty) added a second 30 MB HD.

Five years after I bought my own, the best I could get on at EA (enormous airplane co) had NO HARD DRIVE, MS-DOS 2.4 in ROM, less than about 300 KB RAM, and only a single 5.25" single sided Floppy Drive - and NO SOFTWARE. Does anyone else (except maybe Fooles Troupe?) remember when we wrote letters with edlin?

John