tal , 17 hours ago (edited 17 hours ago)

I mean, I’m sure Intel cares.

My problem is really in how they handled the situation once they knew that there was a problem, not even the initial manufacturing defect.

Yes, okay. They didn’t know exactly the problem, didn’t know exactly the scope, and didn’t have a fix. Fine. I get that that is a really hard problem to solve.

But they knew that there was a problem.

Putting out a list of known-affected processors and a list of known-possibly-affected processors at the earliest date would have at least let their customers do what is possible to mitigate the situation. And I personally think that they shouldn’t have been selling more of the potentially-affected processors until they’d figured out the problem sufficient to ensure that people who bought new ones wouldn’t be affected.

And I think that, at first opportunity, they should have advised customers as to what Intel planned to do, at least within the limits of certainty (e.g. if Intel can confirm that the problem is due to an Intel manufacturing or design problem, then Intel will issue a replacement to consumers who can send in affected CPUs) and what customers should do (save purchase documentation or physical CPUs).

Those are things that Intel could certainly have done but didn’t. This is the first statement they’ve made with some of that kind of information.

It might have meant that an Intel customer holds off on an upgrade to a potentially-problematic processor. Maybe those customers would have been fine taking the risk or just waiting for Intel to figure out the issue, issue an update, and make sure that they used updated systems with the affected processors. But they would have at least been going into this with their eyes open, and been able to mitigate some of the impact.

Like, I think that in general, the expectation should be that a manufacturer who has sold a product with a defect should put out what information they can to help customers mitigate the impact, even if that information is incomplete, at the soonest opportunity. And I generally don’t think that a manufacturer should sell a product with known severe defects (of the “it might likely destroy itself in a couple months” variety).

I think that one should be able to expect that a manufacturer do so even today. If there are some kind of reasons that they are not willing to do so (e.g. concerns about any statement affecting their position in potential class-action suits), I’d like regulators to restructure the rules to eliminate that misincentive. Maybe it could be a stick, like “if you don’t issue information dealing with known product defects of severity X within N days, you are exposed to strict liability”. Or a carrot, like “any information in public statements provided to consumers with the intent of mitigating harm caused by a defective product may not be introduced as evidence in class action lawsuits over the issue”. But I want manufacturers of defective products to act, not to just sit there clammed up, even if they haven’t figured out the full extent of the problem, because they are almost certainly in a better position to figure out the problem and issue information to mitigate it than their customers individually are, and in this case, Intel just silently sat there for a very long time while a lot of their customers tried to figure out the scope of what was going wrong, and often spent a lot of money trying to address the problem themselves when more information from Intel probably would have avoided them incurring some of those costs.