infant mortality

infant mortality n.  It is common lore among hackers (and in
   the electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak
   by now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off
   exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until
   the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O
   devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated
   for the machine to start going senile).  Up to half of all chip and
   wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such
   failures are often referred to as `infant mortality' problems
   (or, occasionally, as `sudden infant death syndrome').  See
   {bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}.