That same target audience would be the least equipped to install a new drive or handle any problems that do come up. How many John Q public people have even opened up their laptop to dust it out?

Problems might be rare, but if I am selling a product (in this case new storage with Linux on it) I need to be able to charge enough to cover all my overhead. Every time I sell it and it doesn’t work out of the box that’s time spent helping the customer, more shipping/return costs, or both. Markup has to cover all that, and I’d guess that it’s not viable as a business model to charge a high enough price to deal with all the random static from computer illiterate people.

I get what you’re saying but I just don’t see it being a viable business strategy to sell this product to that target audience.

Anyone who knows enough to seek out and purchase a Linux OS drive can just download and install it themselves.

Hmmmmmm… I think the hardware bugs might be rare, but common enough to make this a tricky product to sell consistently to the unknown masses.

Also, I think storage partitioning could be a problem; assuming some number of people would have other drives that they had OS/media together, or just separate storage with files they wanted to keep. Those would be NTFS, which can read/write on Linux but you won’t have the best compatibility with Linux program execution (depending on a ton of factors).