Hi-
 
I went for years and years without a single hardware failure that I can recall (just lucky, I guess.) Within the past few years, I've had two Seagate 1TB drives fail (to their credit, they replaced them free of charge each time and extended the warranty) then a Canon printer died a couple of months out of warranty and most recently the HDMI port on my HP x2301 monitor went south -- again, just a few months out of warranty.
 
I will never buy another Canon printer nor another HP monitor, not out of spite, but just because I don't trust that their products are reliable and I can't afford to keep replacing them. Canon bugs me because they're now selling their printers for next to nothing and clearly making up the difference with the crazy amounts they're charging for ink. When I bought the printer, much less expensive cartridge replacements were available (at least on Amazon) but those appear to be gone now. I now have a Brother, which I don't like as well, but at least I can get relatively cheap ink for it (temporarily.)  I'm also buying extended warranties (from third parties,) which I never did before.
 
I had an Okidata printer for more than a decade that just worked, period. I still have working hard drives that are literally decades old. Granted they're not as large or as fast, but they still work fine. I remember when I first got the 1TB Seagate I thought "What if this dies? Isn't it better to have multiple smaller drives, or do I need to have multiple TB drives to back this one up to just in case?" ad infinitum.
 
I guess I'll just purchase extended warranties for all hardware from now on. Aargh! Is it my imagination, or is hardware just not as well made as it used to be?
 
Thanks-
 
-Susan

I can only commiserate with the OP, and this trend has become the "norm" with products (and also why services is where most companies would focus if they had a choice). If something lasted forever, there would be no "resale" opportunity. A few companies made massive attention years ago because of intentionally designing "average failure points" into products, but there is little incentive to make a product last "for life" unless the company can sell one to every person on the planet... so "consumption" is built in unfortunately. It is only when resources vanish that the light bulb goes on.
 
With "technology" is iffy due to obsolescence, but to your point of "quality" machinery from 50+ years ago is worth getting one's hands on, since they were designed to last. Stuff like metal sewing machines, fans with metal blades, etc. are all "keepers" so should be repaired rather than thrown away.
 
The one that has triggered me is generic lawn mowers with brand-name engines that has idler springs designed to fail from heat (after one season basically). After seeing this twice I simply replaced that spring with a real one on a third, and that was 8 years ago... $150 dollar machine made into a "consumable" by a $0.15 part

As a former computer tech and a large Network Manager, things "break" in and out of warranty.  Even the highest rated reliability items fail.  We had a lot of high end IBM equipment in our network and had equipment failures.  We had what was considered, at the time, the top line data communications modems and there were failures. 
 
Current hardware, I see someone praise a particular manufacturer because of longevity and no failures and then I can see someone else that has had a problem and "I'm never buying that brand again". 
 
My own case, I built a desktop PC using a Gigabyte motherboard.  I had several problems with the board, and it was even replaced once under warranty but the second board developed problems.  I finally replaced it with an ASRock motherboard and no more problems.  I could say I'm not buying a Gigabyte motherboard if I build another PC but may never have problems with a new board.
 
Murphy's Law does apply.

Bad devices or bad series of devices was always the reason to change the brand for me... for short time, since the number of brands is limited. For HDD it was WD->Seagate and then Seagate->WD several times.
Once happy with one line, I normally keep going with it (for example Samsung Evo Pro for SSD).
 
I had too many dead Asus motherboards over several years (different kind, from cheap to top), in fact no from them has survived more than 6 years. At the same time I had no problems with Intel, Gigabyte (durable) and ASRock, most of them are still operational (some from the last century).
 
HP is not the first name for a Monitor, but for printers it is! Some cheap models have no chips in cartridges. I use Konica at home (was extremely cheap for color laser 5 years ago), and while it works fine, it was not HP from the day one.
 
My monitor favorite was Viewsonic because of warranty rules for Europe (they have not tried to "repair" or "check" problems).
 
Some general tips (known, but still):
1) if several electrical devices have failed within short time, check what is going on with your power line
2) conventional HDDs are normally not failing instantly, even without warnings from SMART, you normally can see that they are going to fail looking at SMART parameters. Also in most cases you cat recognize bad HDD within 1 month, even in case it can work next 5 years, it is better to check that aging parameters stay 0 and replace it otherwise.

 
Given this sad trend, I've started hoarding items that I like and which I predict will have been cheapened even more by the time I have to replace them.  So instead of just replacing something, I'll buy many to last me till I'm old.
 
I do this also for things that I like but will have changed simply because companies are always changing the products even if they work just fine.  Often the change is done by someone/committee who has obiously never used the product to any great extent and suddenly something is awkward or no longer works.  So I buy several of something so I don't have to get used to something different when it breaks next year.  For instance, I like flat (and cheap) computer mice so when Dell stopped selling the one I was used to, and I discovered just about nobody made flat mice, I bought a hoard of HP Z4000s on sale which'll last me forever.  Same with Dell multi-lingual multi-media keyboards which I was lucky enough to find NOS on ebay from some seller in Texas.
 
For a while it was useful to pay more for something still made in North America, but I've been disappointed of late by even those products becoming poorly made.
 
On the subject of printers, I'm pretty amazed at how inexpensive they've become.  I know it's because of the ridiculous prices for the ink cartridges, but you don't have to buy them.  I've always only bought Epson, since dot-matrix-with-a-typewriter-ribbon days.  (I used to reink that ribbon using a bottle of black ink and an electric drill to get the ribbon to pass over a pad soaked in ink.)  In the last couple of years I've bought two 4-in-1 Epson Workforce printers for 100$ each (colour printing, fax, copy, scan).  These are big, complicated machines, so 100$ is impressive (ok, they're mostly cheap plastic whereas the dot-matrix was solid metal and would have survived a flight out the window). I refill 3rd party ink cartriges myself for next to nothing (a huge bottle of black ink is around 30$, colour is more).
 
I've still never had a hard drive fail, but I don't look forward to buying a new one.  Maybe I won't have to, big SSDs are getting cheap.
 

I myself have gone through streaks of bad luck with several studio items leaving me within a short period ... most of them to be repaired (yes, companies still do repairs for their more expensive products) but it required chasing after support & repair techs, sending equipment all across Europe and so on ... major hassle ...
 
It's tough when these trouble coincide ... and yes, you get into the ranting mood that everything is made to be broken (hey wait that's borrowed from a song ... yeah late nineties ... got it???) but somehow it's still logical if you just think how the number of devices in use has grown over the years, the number of failures must increase, either ...
 
my 50ct

 
This about sums it up :
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_r9AnvHLjk
 
 

The game they are playing with printers is ridiculous. It is cheaper to replace the entire printer than to buy some small plastic vials with colored glycerin. Unbelievable.
 
I agree with fireberd though. In the end, it is luck of the draw as all makers have problems at some point. Some do have a tendency to bring problems on themselves. I have had some WD drives go bad but nowhere near as often as Seagate drives. There are likely others that have had the opposite experience.
 
I think it is primarily due to all the crap coming out of china. Even if a motherboard is made in the US (which I find suspicious) they are still getting the capacitors, boards, chipsets, ... from china. It may not be a problem for companies that maintain high QC but ultimately the work is going to the lowest (pronounced dirt cheap) bidder.

As azslow3 mentioned above, when multiple things fail in a short time you need to take a look at power and grounding. Invest in a real power conditioner / surge suppressor / UPS /  power distribution box and it might save your bacon down the road. If possible, run a dedicated circuit to your audio and computer equipment in which there is a separate ground wire that doesn't connect to the neutral anywhere except the N-G bond at the service panel. If that's not possible, consider an isolation transformer and make sure all your gear is on the secondary side of it. That'll will improve power quality, safety and greatly reduce hum/RFI/EFI problems.
 
I learned these lessons working with large computer rooms and multi-million dollar systems that drive huge companies - and consequently cannot go down, ever. Many of my customers measured downtime in millions of dollars per minute.
 
Of course, I couldn't personally justify the kinds of extreme measures those big operations took, but I have implemented a poor man's version. Doing the grunt labor myself it cost only about $500 total, including the UPS. I'd originally planned on adding an isolation transformer but couldn't afford it - turned out not to be necessary.

I used to swear BY Seagate drives, but now swear AT them.  I had used them whenever possible, and put them into close to 100 computers I had built for folks.  Then, a few years after that, I noticed that I had started seeing some newer computers having Seagate drives starting to fail, and then I noticed they had also dropped the warranty period from 5 years down to 2 or 3 (cannot recall which but was indeed one of the two - 2 or 3).
 
After that, I took another longer look at Western Digital drives (WDC), and they have some drives that have been ROCK solid for me, and I have completely switched over to using those instead of Seagate.
 
I do believe the different model types of WDC drives may well have differing warranty lengths, and you can choose based on need and price points accordingly, but I certainly do give them my vote - particularly over Seagate.
 
Bob Bone