Poor phrasing on my part. Software that ships with devices is always going to have bugs. The question is whether it is a major bug that affects everyone (antenna gate) or a bug that affects some, but not all users. Antenna gate affected everyone, as does the studio display camera issues. Shipping with a major defect that you know is going to get blasted by reviewers is unusual. As for design flaws that tends to be in the eye of the beholder, usually. Linus (Youtube) just blasted the Mac Studio because it was not upgradable. But he loves to build computers from scratch and play with their innards so he considers it a design flaw. I don't.
But antenna-gate wasn’t a bug, it was largely an engineering issue. Apple covered themselves by saying that they weren’t alone in this issue, and they go away with it because they proved that you can disrupt wireless signals on any device if you hold them a certain way. But the disruption caused to the iPhone 4 antenna system was clear and obvious - Apple would have absolutely known.
This was proven when Apple redesigned the antennas in the subsequent enclosure and touted the performance of the wireless reception.
The Mac mini has antenna issues, too. This has been present since the current enclosure was first released and Apple has done nothing to fix it, despite being aware of it.
The revision of the original G3 iMac had overheating issues because Apple removed the fans, believing instead that convection cooling was adequate.
The G5 Mac Pro had design faults with the water cooling system.
The iMac G5 had design faults with the power supply, capacitors and yes cooling too.
The enclosure of the titanium PowerBook and white plastic MacBook cracked during normal use.
The MacBook had ‘flex gate’ and, once again, Apple didn’t budge on it until there was a class action lawsuit. Same with the butterfly keyboards (A silicone membrane to make it quieter? Give me a break!)
The list goes on and those of us old enough to have used Apple products for a few decades will be all too aware.
