Macbooks hard-drives fail?

We’ve got seven Macbooks in the office. In the last month, three of their hard-drives have failed. The oldest was 18 months old, the youngest was 53 weeks old, just a week out of warranty.

The local Macshop says replacing the hard-drive on the latest machine is $285 takes 3-5 days.

We were thinking about buying another 3 or 4 MacBooks both for new staff and to replace some old IBM Thinkpads. (Old as in been around 3 years and never had a day’s trouble.)

Helloooo IBM.