[qchris]

I upvoted your 'steak' puns, but wanted to point out that "the all mechanical switches fail" is not necessarily a useful observation. All things fail, and it's absolutely possible to design a product where either

a) the switches are trivially repairable (like switching out RAM on my Lenovo, which requires exactly two Philips screws), or

b) designing the switches such that their mean time to failure is far longer than the mean time to failure of any of the other critical components, which is absolutely do-able using the right materials and tolerances.

It's not as though audio on a laptop is pumping enormous amounts of current that presents a serious electrical challenge in that respect, and it's unlikely that the mechanism is going to be used 1000 times per day for 10 years.

Edited for formatting