One story I remember reading was about the high quality and robustness of Compaq hardware. [Web search sucks these days so google and bing can't find the story]

The story goes that the floppy disk drive for Compaq computers was rated for a very high number of floppy disk insertions and ejections. More insertions/ejections than were possible unless one was doing nothing but inserting and ejecting floppy disks all the time.

So the exec selected a lower-rated floppy disk drive, saving a bunch of money.