I once bought a set of monolight strobes (for photography) made by a respected brand name (Bowens.) Every unit in the set failed shortly after the 1-year warranty due to failure of the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply. I used these lights heavily, so for other users, they might last two or three years. That's still a remarkably short time to failure for this kind of component.
A friend has an Apple iMac G4 that they paid a shed-load of cash for and expected to last well - it nearly made 3 years. The point of failure? Electrolytic caps in the [overheating] graphics card. The card is soldered in on the screen side of the mobo.
They did change the caps from what I've read (there was a court case about it in the US I gather) but the real fix on teh iMac was putting ventilation holes in! Who'd have thought. Damned form over function. Also I gather they use slot mounting GPUs now?
