I'm not bagging on the PS3's quality, really. It's more or less the same level of hubris shining through again.
Also, the launch PS3s were fortunate enough to have their quality compared to the 360. I had two units that received Sony's dreaded yellow light of death.
3 quarters of the YLOD on the PS3 were because of the NEC capacitors, usually on the GPU side. There was a ton of misinfo about the
"lead free solder" going around because that was the issue the 360 had, but on the PS3 its actually just the capacitors MOST of the time.
The funny thing is that so many were junked or reflowed (which sort of breaths a little more life into the caps, High heat exposure) only to YLOD again...
And they'd end up in the scrap heap when 10 bucks worth of capacitors would have repaired them. Sad really. Ive personally delidded and replaced
the capacitors on about a dozen PS3s even ones that had been previously YLOD's, baked in an oven, and then YLOD's again later , and they still work today( to the
best of my knowledge nobody has come back to me about it ) including my own.
I personally made the mistake and ruined my own launch PS3 trying to "reflow" it , later my friends launch ps3 (we bought them together in 06) YLOD's
and I fixed it by just replacing the capacitors on the back side of the board for the GPU and CPU, though I could have gotten away with just the GPU ....
Man did I feel like an ass for destroying my original PS3.
Thats why the YLOD usually happens inevitably regardless of how much you use the thing or how cool it stays or how good the thermal
pads and paste are....
I also fixed one that had crazy graphical artifacts and weird geometry "Sticks" flying into the distance during gameplay on 3d games
by replacing those capacitors on the GPU side.