[brookst]

Your absolute conviction is misplaced. Support is expensive to provide, especially on hardware that’s expensive to ship around.

This may be a bad move, and you’re certainly right that Synology expects to make more profit with this policy than without it, but it’s a more complex system than you understand. Irate customers calling support and review-bombing for their own mistakes are a real cost.

I don’t blame Synology for wanting to sell fewer units at higher prices to more professional customers. Hobbyists are man attractive market but, well, waves hands at the comments in this thread.

[freeAgent]

The thing is, that more professional market would never make the mistake of putting SMR drives in a RAID array anyway and they are also (I hope) good enough at doing their own research to filter out reviews from uneducated retail consumers. So, again, we’re left with trying to find a justification for this move other than Synology’s profits.

And when this issue happened with WD drives, I don’t remember a backlash against Synology at all. WD, on the other hand, deserved and received plenty of blame.

[devilbunny]

Synology is in that "prosumer" space, though, where maybe you don't really want to sell to hobbyists - but the bulk of your hobbyists in this space are tech-savvy and will recommend your products at work if you don't alienate them.