Afaik the primary mechanisms behind hardware degradation are electromigration in semiconductors and evaporation of electrolyte from capacitors. Both of these ar

Afaik the primary mechanisms behind hardware degradation are electromigration in semiconductors and evaporation of electrolyte from capacitors. Both of these are temperature dependent, and a golden rule is that an increase of 10deg C halves the lifetime of a component (at least for caps). A device may still work most of the time, but the analog electronics that implement the Boolean logic your digital device depends on are running outside design-spec, and the probability of a transient failure is increased. One can further fantasize of secondary effects for example caused by unclean voltage rails due to bad filtering on switching regulators, perhaps increasing the probability of transistors latching up, frying controllers, or directly injecting strong noise typically in the 100kHz range into IO devices fucking with touchscreens, Ethernet, WiFi, you name it. Take all of this with a grain of salt, I'm merely a university dropout struggling to make my boss understand why the 100's of decade old kiosks I service for a living don't work good like they used to. Edit: Apparently my mind-dump above merely scratches the surface. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_components https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_compon...