A quick note about the lifespan of something.
There’s an old joke that products are designed to die just outside of warranty. Well, there actually is a kernel of truth inside that statement. Designed obsolesce was all the rage back in the day. It let you ensure somebody would come back and buy your new item when the old one died/was rendered useless, and also let you save money on cheaper materials and labor. Well, it’s not so much talked about anymore because a company doesn’t even need to think about doing it on purpose. The glut of modern purchasing is on disposable items that only have one use anyway and things that will become obsolete just from the frantic pace of development (mostly electronics, but all the household appliances are getting in on the new feature bandwagon). And, in a effort to keep costs down, things are made as cheaply as possible. Which means that, occasionally, things go rather volatile; exploding laptop batteries, dead from the factory computers, lead in your toys.
Inside this wonderful world of consumer ADD, everything that has stressed components will eventually wear out. The question is usually how fast. The general rule is that, barring the use of flawed parts, the less moving parts, the longer something will go. Electronics will last a long while, a drill less so. Thus, out of this comes two general rules about product failure. Something is likely to fail early due to a defective part or it will fail moderately later due to a defective design. So, if something dies in the first month, it’s probably just a bad unit and warranty replacement will get you something working. But if it fails after say, a year, it’s probably not designed to last and any replacement will do the same. There are exceptions to these rules, but that’s usually how things go.
For example, let’s take my old Vantec 500 watt power supply that I used to power my dual Xeon computer with. I bought it because it was cheap, which isn’t really a good idea. But, it worked fine for about a year or so, then died. Fried itself. Warranty replacement came in a week and I ran that for a year and a half until it suffered the same fate. Try again? No, I figured that I had picked a loser and it was time to pick a winner. So I grabbed a SilverStone 650 watt unit that cost nearly twice as much. It’s been running solid for three years now.
Another example is the RAM I bought middle of last year. Errors all over upon install. Shipped it back, got new ones, and haven’t seen an issue since. A counter example to this is probably those cheap USB drives that Micro Center was liquidating last year. Each one I tried failed within a week.
My latest example is my wireless router. Bought nine months ago, it ran well enough. Every review of it mentioned it ran stupid hot, so I tried to keep it in the path of moving air. But, well, it cooked itself I guess, because it’s now not turning on. I called their help line (the only way to get an RMA), but was on hold for goddamn forever. I gave up after some thought. This item is, as far as I can tell, not even sold anymore. It was cheaper than anything else, ran itself into the ground, and any replacement would probably do the same. Time to just suck it up and get something else that will hopefully work.