Sieanr dead on. Its an engineering issue. The PS2 like the PS1 was poorly designed. Both had issues with their lasers. Sony isn't the first company to have an issue with their consoles design. The original NES wasn't known for its reliability either. The second version of the NES fixed the original's design flaw, the front loading cartridge slot was the source of a lot of the NES' reliablity issues. The 360 has been problematic as well. Overheating seems to be the main culprit with it. The Atari Lynx literally ate batteries, my brother had one and sometimes brand new batteries would not power it up. We'd pop those same batteries in one of our Gameboys or even my Game Gear and have no issues. The only issue I really have is that Sony doesn't seem to to adequately test their products. Its like they design a product on a computer, skip the real word testing, and go straight into manufacturing it. The PS1, PS2, and PSP all had significant issues. Thankfully, thus far, the PS3 has escaped such reliablity problems.
