Note that this is the minimum lifetime. Semiconductor aging is a statistical process, some devices will happily last much longer, but there is a design minimum

Note that this is the minimum lifetime. Semiconductor aging is a statistical process, some devices will happily last much longer, but there is a design minimum lifetime that has to be accounted for and met. Also, the aging calculations are done under worst possible conditions, ie the computation is for 2years active life for a consumer device, at highest operating voltage, highest operating frequency and highest operating temperature. The time while it is powered down or sleeping isn't aging the device and so doesn't impact lifetime. The actual working life in your hands under regular usage will be (much) longer. There is a reason your average phone works fine for 5+ years from hardware perspective, even if the software side sometimes has shorter planned obsolescence (lack of updates, or updates that demand more from the device than that generation of chip was capable of delivering, etc) For telecommunications, or automotive usage, and in particular for anything that might be failure critical, the testing and metrics are much more onerous, and the minimum guaranteed lifetimes higher. This partly explains why such devices, even when manufactured at advanced nodes, don't exhibit the same performance as consumer devices: some of the performance is being held in reserve to account for the natural degradation due to aging. Source: I'm one of the people quoted in the original article.