[__jal]

A thought experiment: suppose you are in charge of handling repairs for a multinational fleet of hundreds of millions of devices.

One thing you'll probably do is triage: by looking at the numbers of devices that fail in various ways, you can optimize your parts channels, training, processes, etc. in various ways. This is business 101.

Now try to guess how many people have been experiencing this error. My guess is it is a pretty small percentage of several hundred million. I also guess that there are a number of other failure modes affecting similarly small groups of users. In a device as complex as the iPhone, with a population that large, there has to be.

But wait! Now the press is hammering you over one of those small-population failure modes. Everything else equal, you're an idiot if you don't handle that one first.

Of course, thought, this is Apple. So the reasonable, simple explanation makes no sense and instead Occam's Second Exception indicates that when Apple is involved, skullduggery and shenanigans are the only reasonable explanation.

[mmmBacon]

Triaging by data is just the first step. Once you decide it's an actual problem you have to be able to reproduce it. To confirm this is happening, you have to get production phones, then do an out-of-process rework, then do this for different OS versions, OS upgrade methods, iTunes version, etc... Reworking this sensor is not an easy task so you have to have someone do it for you and get their time, etc... It's actually a pretty big project to do this correctly.