Does inverter long warranty mean high quality?

SMA did bump up the warranty to 10 years when CSI demanded all inverter manufacturers to do so. The European Sunny Boys are only warrantied for 5 years.

iPhones only have a one year warranty. Does that mean Apple products aren't reliable? Enphase offers a 25 year warranty on their inverters but only one year on their monitoring. Does this mean their monitoring is not as reliable as their inverter? Of course not.

Offering long warranties have very real costs, especially for publicly traded companies like SMA. If we were to offer a 25 year warranty, we would have to hold a higher reserve on our balance sheet, making our products more expensive. We think that our customers would rather have our high quality products at a lower cost.

Start-ups invariably offer long warranties to make up for lack of track record or the perception of quality problems. As the unfortunate recent events at Solyndra have shown, long warranties offered by start-ups can have limited practical value.

Analogies can be drawn to the wind industry: in the early days, customers requested very long warranties (20 years or so), since it was the wild west and no one had a clue about long term O&M requirements for these big new turbines. Now that the wind industry has matured, turbine warranties are again very short (2 years is typical) since the large suppliers have a track record of shipping quality product that does not fail when properly maintained. You could say that PV today is like the wild west environment in wind 10 years ago.