[mrb]

When Microsoft, Google, or some university publish analysis of hardware failures across large numbers of machines, they always anonymize hardware vendors ("vendor A", "vendor B").

I understand the reasons (not alienating your hardware vendors), but will there ever be a research group who will disclose vendor names? Heck, I would pay for this information.

[wmf]

IMO such information would do more harm than good. By the time they could gather statistics, that model would be obsolete so the stats wouldn't help you buy new equipment. But the kind of people who are still griping about the Deathstar would use the information to troll non-stop.

[boxein]

BUT if we had consistent poor performance for some vendor in a certain category, we could infer that their offerings for that category will also be poor in the future.

[rrreese]

This is dated, only applies to laptops, but it breaks down failures by manufacturer: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/engineering-design-pr...