This isn't about unknown unknowns. The blog post made it clear that the team did not anticipate temperatures to change much in their surroundings. That is a very narrow-minded view: places with around-the-year stable temperatures are the exception, not the rule.
I was born and raised in a place where the annual temperature range can be 90°K. From -55°C in the winter to +35°C in the summer. That is not even an extreme range, there are well-known places with large populations (>10MM) that can experience >100°K differentials.
Perhaps more importantly, temperature changes of 40°K in less than 24h are not uncommon. Daily deltas of 25°K are experienced several times a year.
If a company builds hardware, and they don't factor in a routine impact of thermal effects, they really have no excuse. Choosing to ignore these can be a valid product development or marketing strategy, but not being aware of them is nothing short of myopic.
I too am accustomed to weather, although not nearly as dramatic.
My point is that turning things that are unknown unknowns (from the point of view of the company) into known and checked for possibilities takes concerted effort, time, and money. It's easy to look at a problem after it's found and post-facto determine how to find the same problem quicker next time.
I agree that temperature is very basic, low hanging fruit. Especially for a device that seems to be aimed at operation by construction crews. But regardless of where you draw the line on testing environmental factors, you have to draw it somewhere. And so you will still end up with unknown unknowns that escape your QA or debugging process, sending you down the same path of needing to question your assumptions to figure out what's going on.
(Also you're not really giving them the benefit of the doubt here with this assertion that they didn't take temperature into account at all. It seems that they at least looked at the part temperature ranges. And it'd be courteous to assume that they did power dissipation and temperature rise calcs. What they didn't do was component or integration testing at varying temperatures.)
I was born and raised in a place where the annual temperature range can be 90°K. From -55°C in the winter to +35°C in the summer. That is not even an extreme range, there are well-known places with large populations (>10MM) that can experience >100°K differentials.
Perhaps more importantly, temperature changes of 40°K in less than 24h are not uncommon. Daily deltas of 25°K are experienced several times a year.
If a company builds hardware, and they don't factor in a routine impact of thermal effects, they really have no excuse. Choosing to ignore these can be a valid product development or marketing strategy, but not being aware of them is nothing short of myopic.