Exactly, nice to see some sensible people around.
Like you say defective units are not only normal, they are expected, even by the manufacturer. It's true not just of consoles but of every single product. Especially in the tech world.
It's simply not possible to manufacture these things with a 0% failure rate, never going to happen.
Even if you took a ludicrously low failure rate of 1% (generally it's a few percentage points higher) and taking into account the supposed 2 million Switch consoles manufactured. That's 20,000 faulty consoles out in the wild.
As human nature dictates that the people with faulty units are significantly more vocal than those with perfectly functioning devices (we all like a good grumble when things go wrong
) it's only natural you're going to hear a lot about the faulty devices.
There's a general rule of thumb when it comes to buying anything, but especially tech items. Never, ever base your buying decisions on what you read on the internet or see in the media, without further research. Because the vast majority of the time the negative press is based on a small subset of consumers and just gets blown out of proportion.
If there are actual design flaws in any device that will affect all customers, then nothing short of a product recall will do for the company to save face and keep consumers happy. Be that a full recall of all associated hardware or just a partial recall of faulty components. Then you will hear about it, not just in the media but direct from the manufacturer.
Just look at the unfortunate situation Samsung had recently with exploding batteries. Now that was a real problem.
Personally I've never been unfortunate enough to have a tech product that's been in need of a recall, thankfully. I'm not saying I've never had faulty devices, of course I have but that's normal.
Even with my current car, I've received a letter to say it's going to have to go back for them to refit a part for safety reasons. Am I bothered, will it put me off in future? No, because these things happen from time to time, at most it's a minor inconvenience to get a fix sorted out.
Right that's enough rambling, bloody sleep deprivation