Even in purely digital software, user experience HAS to cover error correction and handling -- from allowing software to fail gracefully, to providing useful error messages, to making things as easy for people to pick up where they left off and eventually when the software gets replaced the user's artifacts aren't irreplaceable.
This same approach also goes for physical products, although we have to adjust the metaphor. Just like software can break and crash, products (and people!) can be broken / injured, and the user experience should allow ways to work around these flaws.
- If I have a laptop and the screen goes out / gets broken (a common enough occurance!), I want a way to either attach a new monitor (so I can continue using the headless device), or at least a way to hook up my device to another machine for final transfer of data.
- If the screen on a phone has a crack that is ugly but not enough to encourage me to replace/repair the device yet, I would hope the design accounts for a minor flaw like this to some degree (assuming the crack isn't so deep that the digitizer is ruined).
- If I break the charge port on my laptop, the rest of the laptop may be perfect, but I'm now unable to use the device beyond the next few hours at most. Apple's magnetic cables solve the problem -- not by making the connection strong, but by making it harmless for a cable to be yanked out thanks to a magnetic locking mechanism that detaches without damaging the rest of the machine.
In short, if we know (thanks to user research, of course!) That most devices bite the dust because of [X], it's a damned good idea to account for [X] and either reinforce or route around the damage accordingly.