In order to understand this you have to take a deep dive into the sometimes-murky world of electronic component sourcing. Even when buying from top tier distri

In order to understand this you have to take a deep dive into the sometimes-murky world of electronic component sourcing. Even when buying from top tier distributors in the US there's potential for getting less-than-wholesome product. The legitimate product manufacturer would have no way of knowing who got what. The best anyone can do is issue a notice like auto manufacturers do for recalls advising you that fake chips may have gotten into the system. Now think about how you might react to that. Externally the chips look exactly the same. Depending on the nature of the organization you might choose to scrap your entire inventory or setup a testing system or. In the case of larger scale production you could very well have 100,000 units of your product manufactured before you can even consider reacting to the news. Once the product is in the market your choices are greatly reduced. Scale is a huge factor. We can send engineers to every single one of our installations to manually swap chips. I did the math, it would probably cost somewhere in the order of five million dollars to do so (travel, time, tools, loss of business, etc.). Well, we can't do that. Few businesses can burn cash like that. And, of course, there's the issue that we might waste millions of dollars swapping out good chips. In this context it is far easier if devices with fake chips stop working and a normal process is used to fix them. You remove liability and quickly identify the clones. In consumer land things are different. There is no sensible way to deal with 100,000 or 1,000,000 units of a product that may have some bad chips. Yes, you probably don't want those devices bricked on purpose. However, if you are operating at that scale you are also responsible for ensuring that your supply chain is not shoving fake or out-of-spec parts into your products. Easier said than done. This isn't the only fake electronic component made by crafty Chinese manufacturers. In that regard this isn't a revelation at all.