Many people don't realize that the entire reason manufacturers have an "extended warranty" is to make a profit; they literally find a sweet spot where they can make the biggest profit from the extended warranty period. if they find that 80% of all failures happen around 3.5 years, they can safely go with a three year extended warranty; by the time the failure occurs they will likely be scot-free as the extended warranty will have run out, they still have the money paid FOR the extended warranty, but are no longer on the hook for fixing the failure.
Basically; I think of it this way, similar to the way, I believe, soybean was saying:
the standard manufacturers warranty that you get automatically is basically the initial load; if the device survives this time period, it will almost always pass the extended warranty, which is devised only to make the manufacturer money.
Look at it this way: I have a laptop that was released in 1994. None of the components had been replaced in the meantime. that's 16 years. the extended warranty was 5 years and the warranty from IBM was 3 years, and the device cost 9 grand initially. It only failed last month; why? the battery leaked on the motherboard. Hey, guess what was covered by neither warranty anyway! Battery leakage So even after finally giving up the ghost, the cause would have made it void under either of the original warranties to begin with.
to manufacturers, devising a profitable extended warranty is nearly a science. In this case, they found the most likely cause of failure and excluded it from both warranties, ensuring themselves a substantial profit.
That being said, I wouldn't have needed the warranty anyway. I just bought another one off ebay for 20 dollars. (9 grand to 20 dollars, quite the deprecation).
in regards to the chart, Even assuming it was 100% and fully perfectly accurate when it was made, it was nullified the moment any of those manufacturers released a new product. Also, there is no such this as 100% reliability; all things fail eventually, and the more they are used, the more likely they are to fail. Rather then going by the absolute time from purchase, the chart should go by operating time to failure; It;s fully possible people bought Asus, Toshiba, or other laptops and devices, put them somewhere, powered them on three years later, and they exploded. How would y ou put that down? "three years"? it didn't actually <last> three years as much as it wasn't turned on for three years; turning it on at any point during that three year period would have resulted in the same fireball. Now, that may be an extreme example; but consider that not everybody uses their PCs the same amount; in fact, people who use their laptops more are more likely to spend more on them, and in an interesting twist some of the more expensive, higher quality models are posessed by Asus and Toshiba, a most curious coincidence.
