Someone in the comments linked to a completely outdated a SquareTrade laptop repair frequency report PDF from 2009. Others noted the date and started conflating that link with the data in the article.
Thank you! I didn't go through the comments closely enough in the original article to figure out what all the posters here were referring to. I believe that since we are discussing long term failure rates, charts derived data from warranty service providers from a year or two ago are still appropriate. It does not surprise me that Apple has the best record, but I would tend to dispute the second chart in the article from 2016 showing that HP, Toshiba and Apple were tied in annualized failure rates. Toshiba maybe, but my recent experiences with HP would indicate that they have produced some real dogs in the last couple of years and the next chart of annualized failure rates will likely show something very different. If it doesn't I would think that the data has been skewed by some unknown factor.