30" LG panels never had a high failure rate. They had a lot of backlight bleed issues but not electronic failures. On the other hand, Samsung 30" panels of the same age had T-CON dying like cockroaches. They had Altera FPGA with the same BGA internal solder bump problem as NVIDIA GPUs.
I can report that cockroaches have a very low fatality rate.
I can report that you fail to observe fatality rate because they have high replication rate.
SNARRFFF!
You made me snort tea (not TEA) all over my keyboard. Fortunately, I learned the hard way and bought a washable one years ago.
While these particular panels may not be high-failure, t-cons in general are a common failure item, and these are connected to a video signal source and power supplies that were of cheapest design and as many corners cut as possible. Plus this one appears to incorporate the video compression processing as well, so even more points of failure concentrated in a single board.
Agreed unlikely these are new at that price, unless somebody bought a containerload of them at a dockside auction that were lost for a few years... I've seen much weirder occurrences.
Apple does require some stuff of their supply chain that seems over the top... until you realize that their entire ecosystem and customer service ethic revolves around steering the customer towards replacement rather than repairing product. This is a plus to those who can afford it; you walk in with your busted, you walk out with new as good or better than you had.
They don't consider the time you have to spend setting up the replacement unit to be part of the equation; you're supposed to just be happy with the "new wonderful". Besides, if you fully buy into their ecology, pretty much anything you bring them can be restored onto a new unit from backup and you lose at most a day or three of your i-Life.
Again; the true Apple customer are folks who consider time to be more precious than money, and Apple caters to that mentality... and in reality, there is something to that point of view.
I've long said that money exists for one purpose; to allow the greedy to set their own price on another man's most precious resource - time.
mnem
"Run, don't walk away from anyone who says 'Time is money.' They grossly undervalue your time, and they do so only so they can rob you of it." ~me