I read the original study and came away thinking that it was skewed strongly to errors that an OS could detect. For example, CPU errors were far worse than DRA

I read the original study and came away thinking that it was skewed strongly to errors that an OS could detect. For example, CPU errors were far worse than DRAM errors, and both were much worse than hard drive errors. Regardless, in my life, "white box" computers have lived twice as long and undergone twice as many upgrades as any of the others. Eventually they got retired when they started crashing. Laptops might get extra ram or drive space but they got retired when they were too slow or too heavy. It doesn't mean the laptops were more reliable. It's like comparing a truck that drives 350,000 miles and a car that covers 120,000 miles. I'd say the truck was more reliable since it fulfilled its job three times as long. I also kept old "white box" machines running much longer because the old 3-4Ghz Pentium-IVs were fast compared to the Core 2 Duo laptops that replaced them. Those machines kept running from the 500MB RAM days to the 4GB RAM/SSD days.