I thought it was commonly accepted that industry knew about this widespread problem in the early 2000s and did nothing about it. Given that industry paid no real price for its faulty caps, now the issue appears to be the fine line between planned obsolescence and cost-cutting. They can continue to use sub-standard capacitors in the name of price-sensitivity of consumers, when in fact it also serves the useful purpose of reducing product lifetimes.
Quoting Bad Caps:
How did this happen?
The reason this problem exists is because of a large-scale industrial espionage foul-up. Some companies decided to steal an electrolyte formula from another competitor. Little be known to them, the stolen formula was incomplete and flawed. They didn’t discover this until it was too late and they had manufactured and distributed literally MILLIONS of these flawed capacitors. It was way too late for any kind of recall, and even today, these crappy components are being used in new boards. As I mentioned before, I believe this problem runs much deeper than simply an industrial espionage screw-up, as that incident was exposed years ago, and the problem still exists today. Nowadays, it just boils down to corporate bean counters cutting corners to save money by using shoddy components.The cause…
This inferior and flawed electrolyte formula was used by a number of component manufacturers that sold to many different, reputable, and well known motherboard manufacturers. This problem isn’t isolated to one particular brand of motherboard, and not even isolated to motherboards alone. I won’t mention brands, but a VERY popular monitor manufacturer has been plagued with RMA’s on some of their monitors that were built using these inferior capacitors. This problem has been reported in computer motherboards, monitors, televisions, radios, and stereo equipment. Through my experiences owning a service center, I’ve personally seen and serviced a large number of ‘high-end’ equipment that had prematurely failed capacitors.