I wouldn't. You're not responding to the person who posted the search results.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Who posted what search results, and where? I’m responding to your questions and comments here. If you think I should be responding to someone or something else, can you point me in the right direction?
Maybe 10-15 years ago, when the term “binned” began to ramp up in how frequently it was used in articles and comments online (or at least that's about when I began seeing it more--it started in earnest in the 1990s), I hadn’t yet consistently heard the term often enough to take the time to find out what it meant, even though I’ve been an electronics technician with an interest in just about all aspects of electronics since the mid-1970s. Once I decided to look into it and did some searches online, like you, I was confused by what seemed like multiple interpretations, and I asked pretty much all the same questions you’ve been asking, including wondering why there are conflicting ideas about it from people who seemed to know what they were talking about. I weighed all the explanations, like separating wheat from chaff, and though it took a day or two for things to sink in, I figured out what it actually meant. I came to realize it was just a matter of not everyone describing what the term means entirely correctly, and so I no longer paid attention to the wrong, or even just half-right explanations. As you say, “based on the responses, even the people who think they know are not in agreement with each other.” So, I stopped expecting that everyone commenting about binning, both past, present, and future, would always get it right.
The short explanation is that when people disparagingly say manufacturers use binned chips in their lower-tier products, it’s a misuse of the term, since “binning” happens to even the perfect chips—they’re placed in their own bin. So it’s also incorrect to disparage the lower-performing parts that get put into different bins and are then used in lower-priced and more power-efficient products, by dismissing them as “binned parts”, since manufacturers can’t be expected to run multiple fab runs that somehow produce nothing but perfect, high-end parts for one run that get put into the pricier and more power-hungry products, and perfect parts for another run but with different die/mask layouts designed to produce parts with lower specs.
