Speaking of worse quality in terms of ICs, I find it interesting that today, Apple has dramatically improved the quality of the Apple Silicon chips they designed in-house and partnered with TSMC in Taiwan to manufacture those M1 and M2 chips. Back then, Apple squandered and came up with questionable quality ICs aside from Japan's ICs, which were much better. Now that Apple is a $3+ trillion company makes its dark manufacturing history laughable that on the consumer side, back then, people were wowed as engineers on the other side facepalmed. Who messed up? The executives. Steve Jobs was right - the executives, particularly John Sculley, flopped.
On the bright side, playing on those vintage Apple computers is more fun now. I know there are challenges, but imagine if we reverse engineered RAM chips and have those made with better quality? The day will come when we can do that in the comfort of our homes with PCB and 3D printing technology and continue to have fun with those old Apple computers.
Let's not have those lousy executives, including Jean Louis Gassee. He screamed and yelled at some Engineers and demanded certain things that, in turn, compromised the quality and put a dampener on our vintage Apple fun.
Oh, sorry, I was mumbling nonsensically.
Anyway, yeah, I think reliability is subjective. I mean, it depends on age and other factors, right? I saw a YouTube video where one person tried to save an Atari computer in vain. It was restored, running fine, until one day some of the chips started to fail. That person realized that some vintage computers reach a point where it's better to retire them.
That makes me wonder, can we have RAM and other necessary chips "reloaded" like reloaded mobos?