It’s more complicated than that. It’s literally that sometimes two of the exact same item last for radically different times. It’s not a different design or manufacturing process, just an amorphous series of random factors lining up we call luck.
Mean time between failures is something they do actually measure in manufacturing, and you see interesting results like what hard drive manufacturers do to increase reliability: stress test the drives until the ones destined to fail early fail, and then sell the others.
There are things that can increase reliability, but a lot of the things that make the extreme outliers are just random, and no one documents what they were because they didn’t know it was going not have an effect, good or bad.
It’s more complicated than that. It’s literally that sometimes two of the exact same item last for radically different times. It’s not a different design or manufacturing process, just an amorphous series of random factors lining up we call luck.
Mean time between failures is something they do actually measure in manufacturing, and you see interesting results like what hard drive manufacturers do to increase reliability: stress test the drives until the ones destined to fail early fail, and then sell the others.
There are things that can increase reliability, but a lot of the things that make the extreme outliers are just random, and no one documents what they were because they didn’t know it was going not have an effect, good or bad.