I know I'm late to this, but I find the discussion about "never" failing a bit amusing.
A couple of anecdotes and comments:
1. Back in 1995 or so, my grandfather spent about 6 weeks in the hospital, and in that time he agreed to having an implantable defibrillator installed. At the time, it was decently major surgery. My mind is a bit vague on details, but I seem to recall that they installed and tested it in the OR, and it worked fine. A couple of days later, a situation came up where it should have but didn't. Fortunately he was still at the hospital and they could take care of things, but they did some further diagnostics and found that it had basically quit working. This was a(then) top notch cardiac hospital that had been installing the things pretty much as long as they'd been on the market-the failure was the first of its type that they'd seen. A few days later, he had a replacement. This wasn't a computer, but a 5-figure implantable medical device where the stakes are incredibly high if it fails.
2. I have a big pile of NOS 500gb PATA drives for the Xserve G5. Despite them being NOS, if you power one up and look at it in SMART utility, you'll see a couple hundred hours of operation. This is common on pretty much any enterprise grade drive you buy. You'll see something referenced called the "bathtub curve" of failures on electronics components, which basically means that failures are high when something is first put into operation, fall off with increased operation, and then increase toward end of design life. Enterprise drives-and a lot of other enterprise class hardware-gets a few hundred hours of operation to hopefully catch failures in the head end of that. Most consumer hardware gets a basic power on/operation test and goes out the door.
3. Some things have design flaws that will appear eventually if the item is used. Apple can worsen things because default they tend to prefer bumping up against temperature design limits while keeping the computer quiet vs. aggressive cooling that's noisy. Even at that, liquid cooled PPC G5s will probably leak eventually, or can be headed off iff they're serviced, although I've been lucky personally. nVidia shipped bad GPUs for the MBP 3,1/4,1-they later released a revised one that fixed the issue, but the original version will inevitably fail. Fortunately it can be fixed. The same thing happened with the Radeon GPUs in the 2011 15" and 17" MBPs, although there is no repaired GPU for them-the only fix if you want to keep using one is to disable the discreet GPU completely.
