i have a lenovo (well, it actually says IBM T60) that is 4 years old. I've had to replace the battery once and I've worn through the left shift key and the text imprinted on the 'A' key (so, I use it a lot :)

My experience (I've owned at least 5 generations of thinkpads and nothing else) is that IBM was bullet proof and I thought Lenovo would have kept that up. But the graph doesn't reflect that. It is time to move on, but how will I live without my trackpoint??? Maybe I'll just pop an SSD drive into this thing and keep it for another couple of years.

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Other data points:

My wife's low end ASUS has never had a problem.

My daughter's Toshiba, OTOH, was DOA and it took a couple of tries at the local repair depot to sort it out -- but it now appears to have settled in.

This yellow is the color of the first house brand grocery labeling (Loblaw's No-Name brand) so it has strong "low cost" connotations in Canada.

When my then 8 year old daughter wanted a DAP I directed her to the cube.

She goes pocket-less many days so fitting there's not an issue. In fact, the cube-ness means that it is impossible to put enough torque on it to snap it. Only a hammer would crack it open :-) With the lanyard integrated earbuds and clear rubbery shock absorber wrapper, it has survived two years of abuse -- with only one replacement earbud set required.

Not the most intuitive interface on the version with the screen, but all she does is press 'play' anyway. I think this version would have been even better for her.