I don't think that holds. In fact while longer-wear flash devices do exist in the market, the design mistake here would have driven any feasible part to failure. While you can argue that choosing consumer parts was "a" mistake, it wasn't the one that caused this failure, which was a software/integration thing.

If you had twice the writes per cell, the life would be 10 years instead of 5. Still wasteful, but...

And if you stepped up to something with effective wear levelling and a bit more capacity, instead, this bad design could have lasted forever.

Or if you socketed the eMMC, it would have been no big deal.

I think the biggest mistake here is the drivetrain depending on a device which is known to fail (eMMC) even without the logging problem (why not using a separate device for the logging?) it would eventually fail, other manufacturers have similar problems, (Mazda, Ford, Mercedes) but you just lose the audio system.

> drivetrain depending on a device which is known to fail

Uh... the drive train itself is "known to fail". Everything wears out. Everything breaks. You just aren't surprised when your transmission needs rebuilding or your brakes or shocks need replacement because those are "car things" you've been conditioned are normal. Well, electromigration is just another kind of normal wear and tear to be designed into the device.

And it's the design here that was at fault, having incorrectly planned for the replacement rate. But there's absolutely nothing weird about building cars out of parts that fail over time!

The drivetrain doesn't fail when eMMC does. A whole lot of stuff that you'd normally do on the touchscreen is inaccessible, though.