I’ve had at least once cellphone in personal service since my first one in 1984 (a Motorola luggable about the size, weight, and shape of a car battery with service from NewVector) to my current one from Sanyo (SCP-7050, service by Sprint).

In all that time, and with all those units I’ve only had two that problems, one electrical (NEC handheld analog the just quit for no reason back in about ’95) and one mechanical (the current Sanyo PCS with a simple mechanical failure of the battery retention latch).

With computers (all but two being Macs) I’ve had three failures since 1983. First was a hard drive failure in my original UNIX server in 1986 (TRS 16B+ w/Xenix), second and third were laptop failures – one damaged screen, one failed logic board.

Internet access failures are simple short-term failures, and are expected of any complex utility type service. I cannot begin to count the number of failures in 36 years of internet use (my first Usenet post was back on 03JUN1982), but luckily all have been reasonably short term problems.

Just looking at the past 12 months I’ve had the one cellphone failure and numerous short term internet failures.

All in all, my experience with “high tech devices and services” has been very good. Actually VERY good.