Hardware defects are often worked around by firmware. It can be things like adjusting current drive or lowering the clocks conditionally to mitigate EMI. It can

Hardware defects are often worked around by firmware. It can be things like adjusting current drive or lowering the clocks conditionally to mitigate EMI. It can even check the serial numbers of the hardware to determine what to do for the pieces with inferior quality in order to pass QA and increase yields. If customers get to find out what kind of defects or which batches are inferior, that would imply costly consequences for business.