> I don't understand why manufacturers (and their customers) consider it OK to ship broken DRAM chips that do not conform to their stated specifications.
Because they can, and sucks to be you. This is how things are everywhere. For competitive markets, the only real quality pressure is regulatory and contractual (and maybe reputational, sometimes). There needs to be a direct feedback loop between the value end-customers care about and the profit of producers/sellers for that value to matter.
As a random and interesting example of this phenomenon (really seen everywhere), here's something I learned yesterday: according to Derek Lowe[0], there's no graphene supplier anywhere that actually supplies you graphene, and they all tend to lie about it. Apparently this is one of the big things that holds graphene research back (and probably invalidates a bunch of papers).
Because they can, and sucks to be you. This is how things are everywhere. For competitive markets, the only real quality pressure is regulatory and contractual (and maybe reputational, sometimes). There needs to be a direct feedback loop between the value end-customers care about and the profit of producers/sellers for that value to matter.
As a random and interesting example of this phenomenon (really seen everywhere), here's something I learned yesterday: according to Derek Lowe[0], there's no graphene supplier anywhere that actually supplies you graphene, and they all tend to lie about it. Apparently this is one of the big things that holds graphene research back (and probably invalidates a bunch of papers).
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[0] - http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/11/gra...