Somebody actually poisoned Tylenol. People realize that all the food they eat could have been poisoned in the grocery store. There's no easy mapping to "every external hard drive manufacturer could stop updating their products and your data could spontaneously delete itself."
True, a small computer running an Internet connected general purpose operating system should have a prominently labeled expiration date of some short time after the last patch. Use after that date is not recommended and potentially dangerous. WD sold something that looked like a toaster to the consumer but was actually a lump of cheese.
There have been incidents of (other manufacturers') hard drives shipping with pre-installed malware though [e.g. 0]. I think that's a good analogue for Tylenol.
