I'm almost sure that the components without moving parts will become technologically obsolete long before they start to fail. When I buy used laptop I always change the HDD, the DVD and its reliability jumps sharply up.
That may very well be true on average but I'd bet there are plenty of CPUs and memory modules that fail in the first year of usage for example. After all CPUs are tested and sorted into high/low performance parts, so sample variation itself would be enough to generate some early failures.
As a consumer it's hard enough to keep up with what's reliable in hard drives. Keeping the manufacturers honest with good stats for the most common parts would be great.
Even things with moving parts, it would be nice to know that model X of brand Y has a MTBF of 4.5 years, but hunting the same model X 4.5 years later isn't likely to yield the exact same hardware but some later revision of the same specced hardware.
