[cucumber3732842]

This analysis is missing price though.

A lot of times it's cheaper to just full send it than produce a full run at a given quality with a low rejection rate.

The "old" way of making a black fan is you just QC check them, send the good ones to Noctua, send the crappy ones to someone who DGAF because they're putting them some sort of industrial appliance that needs airflow through the box.

Everyone "wins" this way because Noctua gets their fan to spec cheaper and the people building plasma cutters or control units for chemical washers or ATMs get a fan that's "fundamentally good" if sloppily executed and the manufacturer gets less waste. Ain't no different than how the pork belly that doesn't become your bacon becomes dog food and die lubricant.

I suspect this is where a lot of the "X compatible" power tool stuff on Amazon comes from. That and/or the repurposing of "worn out" dies.

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Yes you provide a great example of binning and market separation. Though I think in this case there's some limiting factors that make it infeasible to bin these fancy Noctua fan rotors including: 1) tooling have limited lifetime and will get sloppier and worse yields as time goes on. It's inefficient to use precious cycles of a precise tool and die on producing lower grade parts. 2) the material itself is likely more expensive than what industrial/lower grade use cases require. Why use reject Noctua when you can get regular crappy plastic for 1/500th the cost? 3) I expect Noctua stuff to be a much lower volume than lower cost/quality vendors so the volume of Noctua rejects is likely too low for a company to dedicate a product line using it. 4) brand/marketing reasons

Another obvious use case of binning is for microchips where the same die can be "wounded" to create multiple product variants that target different market segments, and also yield improvement from being able to isolate and disable an area of the die that are defective. However improving the manufacturability and yield itself is still fundamentally important