> Lots of production processes do that.
Please remain within the context we're speaking in: final design not components. When manufacturing a component, like a resistor or chip, you do almost always have a normal distribution. You're making things with sand, metal, etc. Some bits of crystal will have defects, maybe you ended up with the 0.01% in your 99.99% purity source materials, etc. You test and bin those components so they fall within certain tolerances, so the customer sees a deterministic component. You control the distribution the customer sees as much as possible.
Someone selecting components for their design will use the tolerance of the component as the parameter of that design. You DO NOT intentionally choose a part with a tolerance wider than your design can accommodate. As I said, if you can't source a component within the tolerance you need, you force that tolerance through IQC, so that your final design is guaranteed to work, because it's always cheaper to test a component than to test something that you paid to assemble with bad parts. You design based on a tolerance, not a distribution.
> Determinism is a good goal but it's not an absolute goal and it's not mandatory.
As I said, choosing to not be deterministic, by choosing a tolerance your design can't accomodate is rare, because it's baking malfunction and waste into the design. That is sometimes done (as I said), but it's very rare, and absofuckinglutly never done with resistors tolerance selection.
> But your post gives off some pretty string implications that you need a 0% defect rate, and that's not realistic either.
> There's a point where decreasing defects costs more than filtering them.
No, defects are not intentional, by definition. There will always be defects. A tolerance is something that you can rely on, when choosing a component, because you are guaranteed to only get loss from actual defects, with the defects being bad components outside the tolerance. If you make a design that can't accommodate a tolerance that you intentionally choose, it is not a defect, it's part of the design.
0% defect has nothing to do with what I'm saying. I'm saying intentionally choosing tolerances that your design can't accommodate is very very rare, and almost always followed by IQC to bin the parts, to make sure the tolerance remains within the operating parameters of the design.
I feel like this has lead to circles. I suggest re-reading the thread.
Maybe you could give an example where you see this being intentionally done (besides Wish.com merchandise, where I would question if it's intentional).