why electronic device often dies quickly or lasts forever?

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brannsiu

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My personal experience is, my PC screen bought in early 2008 went wrong in 2010, luckily a few months before warranty expired and they replaced the a board for me, now 2020, 10 years after, it is still going strong.

I had a portable charger that failed in 10 months of time and luckily before warranty, it got replaced and now 5 years after, it is going strong

My iPhone 5s has the same story, the screen went dark by itself without any drop or accidental damage after
11.5 months, on that day their maintenance section was closed so they made a special and friendly arrangement and gave me a brand new iPhone 5s, it was in late 2014. Now 2020, it is still going strong

Why it's like, electronic device really dies quickly or lasts forever? What is the possible reason behind??
 

USAFRet

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If there is a manufacturing fault, it will show quickly once you put a load on it.
If there is no manufacturing fault...it tends to run for quite a long time. There is nothing to cause it to fail.

Counterpoint - A dead SSD of mine that died at just over 3 years.
 
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brannsiu

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If there is a manufacturing fault, it will show quickly once you put a load on it.
If there is no manufacturing fault...it tends to run for quite a long time. There is nothing to cause it to fail.

Counterpoint - A dead SSD of mine that died at just over 3 years.


Interestingly, I've got 10+ portable hard drives (not SSD) of different sizes, but mostly 3.5"

None of them goes wrong now after 5 years of purchase, is it because hard drive
manufacture is already very good and very sophisticated?
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
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Apart from how you treat them, the parts I used to replace the most often in my PC was the HDD.

It's not just the parts that die that can affect it, it's also the power supply. If you put a cheap PSU into a system with good parts, it can kill them. I think at least 2 of my hdd were killed by the cheap PSU I used at the time. Once I started using better PSU, the rate of hardware death dropped to point my last pc lasted 9 years and I only replaced 1 hdd in that time. Several parts got upgraded but that's another story.

ssd have got a way better chance of surviving a drop than a HDD does.

The headphone jack on my Samsung Galaxy S7 died almost 18 months into me owning it, so got a new one under warranty and it lasted another 2 years until I decided to upgrade this year. It still works, its my spare now. Its headphone jack is also broken but I use wireless headset now. The fault could have been my doing.
 

brannsiu

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Apart from how you treat them, the parts I used to replace the most often in my PC was the HDD.

It's not just the parts that die that can affect it, it's also the power supply. If you put a cheap PSU into a system with good parts, it can kill them. I think at least 2 of my hdd were killed by the cheap PSU I used at the time. Once I started using better PSU, the rate of hardware death dropped to point my last pc lasted 9 years and I only replaced 1 hdd in that time. Several parts got upgraded but that's another story.

ssd have got a way better chance of surviving a drop than a HDD does.

The headphone jack on my Samsung Galaxy S7 died almost 18 months into me owning it, so got a new one under warranty and it lasted another 2 years until I decided to upgrade this year. It still works, its my spare now. Its headphone jack is also broken but I use wireless headset now. The fault could have been my doing.

Does a "cheap" PSU depend on the brand or the model? I mean, for example, brand A makes all the good PSU while brand B makes all the PSU of poor quality regardless of its model??
 
Nov 26, 2019
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Parts can fail prematurely due to "dirty" power and thermal stress on the material, too. If you use your computer a lot, turning the computer on and off takes some parts like the CPU to extreme temperatures and then cools them. Over time, that can lead to premature hardware failure.
 

mchldpy

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The saying "Cold starts are harder on a PC than leaving it running" is something I follow. I never kill it unless I need to get inside it. 3 of my 4 boards are 785G Chipsets circa 2009, still going strong.
 
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