Anker should know better by this point. Changing specs without notifying customers is the basic formula of every Chinese manufacturer. They must have gotten lazy with their internal QA/QC processes and random sampling.
It clearly isn't the "basic formula" if it was so out of the norm it caused a national controversy and got the vendor's certifications removed. Your bitterness is showing.
No this is honestly par for the course in China - saying this as someone who manufactures millions of consumer devices there annually. You have to CONSTANTLY QA supplier materials to make sure no corners were cut.
We have an entire lab just to test upstream components (which LiPO pouch cells are part of) and most of the out-of-spec cases were suppliers changing components or assembly tooling/process. We had DC motors that were failing prematurely in products and after some forensic investigation found that the supplier changed the stator wiring to a nominally smaller diameter which was overheating and burning out - and they added more metal to the casing so they would weigh the same.
While I'm sympathetic to this sort of reasoning, there are many, many examples (even in the US!) of bad behavior being so commonplace that it's expected, and no one gets punished until one sticks out enough (or fucks up hard enough) to force the local authorities to actually pay attention and slap them on the wrist. In this particular case, I think it's entirely within what we would expect from the CCP to say "you got caught and made China look bad, you're going to face consequences".
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
No, quality control is never based on external packaging, for anything*, since quality control is about the objective quality of the final product: if you're not measuring it, you're not controlling that parameters quality. For batteries, this includes things like x-ray to verify all the layer geometries and assembly, materials, etc [1].
