I am sorry but people are a bit confused.
If ford was selling a car with a defective part in the ABS system and they knew it was defective, yet kept ordering and selling them then it would be their fault not the supplier when it came to lawsuits.
Well, that's the thing --what is "defective"? Defective is usually going to be defined by the mission and operating environment, not just the part. For instance, we rather famously had a bridge collapse here in Minnesota about a year ago. Some really big gusset plates were finally determined to have been not quite big enough for the load they were required to take.
But if those same gusset plates had been on your average country highway bridge across a small local river, rather than an interstate bridge across the Mississippi, they'd have done just fine.
All of which to say is, change the operating environment and potentially you can change what was a defective part into no longer being a defective part.
Potentially. Thing is, I'd say the burden of proof is on the vendor at that point, the dang thing having failed once, and if you continue to have failures even after your "environmental fix" then your already shaky credibility begins to look like self-serving horsefeathers.
We'll have to see which way it works out.
And I've got one of these chips in my own notebook, so I'm not a disinterested party here.