[yomlica8]

One unexpected issue with digital media is changing manufacturing quality and an inability to identify it until it is to late. Early stage floppy disks and CDs actually were pretty reliable but by the tail end so much cost saving had happened in manufacturing they'd turned to crap.

The same thing has happened with flash drives already, how do you identify a good flash drive? If you aren't careful you'll end up with a counterfeit but even the genuine articles have shaky reputations and manufacturers change the internal parts all the time.

[II2II]

I definitely agree with the difficulty in identifying reliable products, and it is made even more difficult due to marketing (e.g. conflating the "quality materials" of the shell with the overall reliability of the product).

That said, such things did happen in the past. Paper is the classic example since the manufacturing process affected its longevity, yet many other materials are graded based upon their properties.