Has the mean time to to failure for laptops reduced drastically?

Hmm, interesting. I kept most of my old laptops and only 1 out of about 10 has failed; A Toshiba Tecra S1 from early 2000s. The GPU chip on that one failed and it would have been too much hassle to repair. (soldered on the mainboard)

Other than that, I still have a Core 2 Duo HP laptop from ~2007-8 that's fine, but I haven't been using for a few years, a 2011 Sandy Bridge Thinkpad that's still seeing semi-frequent use, and a ~2017 Kaby Lake daily driver. Actually, I have another Core 2 Duo from the same 2008 time frame which used CCFL backlighting, and that did fail. I did replace the backlighting with LED strips and it is usable, but it's a bad hack. So you can count that as a failure as well.

Other than that, I don't know what failures you're referring too. One of the old HDD did have some failures at some point (after SMART testing), but I used the manufacturer's software to map around the bad sectors. So in my experience, hardware is very reliable.

Truth be told, I bought the Kaby Lake (a Dell Inspiron) with water damage, and I did the mainboard repair myself (which was not worth it from a time perspective, it took me at least a week of debugging, going through the schematics, checking the signals from the superIO chip, only to find that I only needed to replace a couple of 0805 resistors). Maybe I don't count minor things as failures, if I can work around them? The Sandy Bridge Thinkpad does have a tendency to overheat, to the point where it shuts down. Cleaning it and replacing the thermal paste only partially solves the issue, so I've been running it underclocked mostly. But that only comes up when all cores are under 100% utilization.

Hm, just some data points:

my private laptop is a Thinkpad T520. I replaced the battery four times now in some 10 years, I gave it a RAM boost a year ago... the marketing lettering is flaking off, and it has one small crack on a side where it made unplanned contact with a concrete floor - but the machine is working strong. They will have to pry that machine out of my cold dead hands should it not die before me. I run it under a debianesque Linux with i3wm.

Work laptop is a 2017 HP Elitebook. This thing is utter garbage. I'm not talking about the funny idea to add a display port instead of HDMI for political reasons - but it keeps overheating, it's fan is loud as hell's airport approach, and every once in a while, it randomly bluescreens - and needs some funky key combination during BIOS to become workable again. Once Covid is over and we're back in the office, this thing will get replaced. Windows 10, and sluggish.

No?

I guess my anecdotal experience with owning laptops from the early 2000s to today. An early 2000s laptop I expected to last between 18-24 months before it was shot. I don't think anyone made it through my college on the same laptop from Freshman year to graduation regardless of manufacturer.

Laptops in the last 10 years? All of those went at lest 4 years, and my 2014 MBP is still running fine. So it seems to me like things are improving.

My older laptops died quickly, with pretty bad hardware faults within 2-3 years. After those first few laptops, I have a 2011 MBA that's chugging along fine (manually replaced the battery), as well as a ~2016 XPS 13 9350 (also manually replaced the battery) and a 3 year old Gigabyte gaming laptop that are all working fine. So for me I'd say mean time to failure has been increasing.

I think several things have happened. First people become more careful with their laptops. Two less likely to replace with faster model as your current one is fast enough. Third in general improved quality as bad machines get a rep and go out of business.

I have 5. 1 Dell Inspironfrom 2006 with a broken gpu. Then another one from 2007 that's still working. 1 asus from 2012 that's still working. Another one from 2015 working too. And my current notebook is also an Asus from 2017.

Yes, but look at the prices. People are buying cheap crap. Buy a Macbook and it will work for many years and then you'll sell it for a good price.