There is a tendency to blame all manner of bad things on RoHS, but facts are 
things do break and consumer products are not as reliable as they once were. 

The majority of faults we see are not new problems associated with Pb-free 
soldering, but old friends of assembly defects that come back to haunt us 
again from past days of SnPb soldering, re-excited by the narrower process 
windows. That said, so far (touchwood), carefully monitoring any and all 
customer returns since converting certain professional products to RoHS 
versions as we were required to do, we have not seen any downward trend in 
reliability due to the conversion.

Japan adopted "lead-free" before RoHS impacted, but without the parts that 
could survive the higher soldering temperatures, the assemblies would be a 
mixture of Pb-free and Pb parts, and other alloys with lower melting points 
were used, not good old SAC and SnCu. 
If anything it would be these early lifetime Pb-free products we should be 
expecting to be WEEE long ago and current output to be just as reliable as we 
have always expected consumer electronics to be.... 

Which means, in our throwaway society when the laptop PC, PDA or cellphone 
you buy is already superceded by a better, faster, more fully-featured model 
the moment you open the box at home, just getting enough reliability to make 
it last through the warranty period may be good enough to keep a market 
reputation for good build quality, since you'll want (or be persuaded to want) 
the next model by then.

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