I work with quite a few manufacturers and the simple fact is that it is generally cheaper just to trash damaged goods then to repair. There's a certain failure rate in the manufacturing process and while they work hard through quality control to catch bad equipment before it leaves the factory, some flawed equip hits the streets. If a consumer buys a damaged product and returns it to the manufacturer, it is checked to see if it is an 'easy' fix or a 'difficult' fix. Easy stuff is repaired and returned, but the difficult stuff either (a) costs more to repair than to remanufacture or (b) even if repaired, has a high recurrence rate of error. If there is a high chance or recurrence, they trash it because they don't want consumers who laid out thousands on gear getting furious at them when they have the same problem over and over and over (ie, people like me, who went Canon when it was time to buy a DSLR because of the lemon Nikon I owned prior). Indpendant of the cost difference in fulfilling warranty obligations, the simple fact is that a manufacturer's name and reputation mean more than anything, so giving a consumer a "good" copy is the right thing to do. If you think this cost a lot, you should see how much Microsoft has shelled out giving Xbox 360 owners new Xbox 360 units after a design failure in initial units caused them to die out at about the 3 year mark. It was well after the warranty period expired, and Microsoft still did the right thing and voluntarily gave owners a whole new unit. Costly ? Yes. But it was the right business decision, and it retained a lot of angry consumers who might have changed their brand loyalty in anger.
