The customer experience of hardware failure

We live in digital times with our lives played out through the interweb with a smart phone, tablet or laptop never far from our reach. As a result these electronic aids form an essential part of everyday life with blind panic setting in if we can't check our emails at a moments notice to check on that latest offer from Groupon for a fish pedicure at half price. This means hardware failure of one of these precious gems hits us like a cold hard slap to the face. Whatever the timing it is invariably the end of the world as we see the blue screen of death on a machine or worse still nothing, no flicker, no clever flowing graphics, no 70's sounding doorbell noises. Just a loss of functionality and an end to life as we know it. Of course every cloud.....this loss of utility for some sparks the flash of genius which heralds upgrade. That shiny new laptop you have been subtly interweaving into conversation with your other half now becomes a whole new topic of interest as they too are thrown into the dark ages of tech. While your trusty machine lays wounded you feverishly begin researching its successor. Bigger processors, chips, screens, memory. You name it more, more, more. While all the time last years laptop now lies defunc and most likely easily repaired but this would remove this wonderful opportunity for an upgrade you don't need to justify. Hardware failure. Maybe not such an epic fail.