A classic example of what you're talking about is Los Angeles. Almost the entire stretch of land between Santa Barbara and San Diego is developed, and so now you see ever-growing hordes of people in the more inland, desert communities.
1998-2003. The fees started at $1300/quarter or $3900/year, and ended at $1400/quarter, or $4200/year. As a California resident, I got the much lower in-state tuition.
Well, MTBF could be tested manufacturer-side too. I'm not sure why HP/Lenovo/et. al. have not come out and said "After exhaustive testing, we've shown our netbooks last the wear-equivalent of X years of average usage, which is Y years/months more than that of competitors Z, A, and B."
My feeling is that they consider netbooks disposable and their "real" notebooks to be the focus of QC.
manufacturer mbtf testing, well, I would not in any way trust a manufacturers numbers compared to the numbers of a rival manufacturer. there are far too many small, subtle things you can do to inflate your MBTF numbers.
Even if they were trying to be honest, testing wear (where wear might be mostly, say, how often the damned thing gets dropped) is really hard. On average, how many times a year does a laptop get dropped? and is that number the same as the times a netbook gets dropped? is there something about it's size/shape (or, unknowably at product launch-time, the demographics of the buyers) that cause netbooks to get dropped more or less?
