>No, anecdotes are data

They're not good data, they're some of the worst. Your idiosyncratic one-off experience should be addressed, but not necessarily generalized from. I feel like this is an important, perhaps even the most fundamental prerequisite for information literacy.

Ok, so my Pixel 1, 3, 5, and 7 have had no problems.

Data shows 100% reliability then?

I agree they are 100% data that's why we can say with absolute confidence there are no issues. (source my anecdotes)

tbf this is abusing the word anecdote a bit. Anecdotes are unreliable narratives and hearsay, not facts or data.

An anecdote is "I forgot to pray before bed last night and now I have a headache. See God is punishing me." and other people agreeing with this happening to them.

Saying, "here is a documented pixel bug that was released on day x but wasn't fixed until day y" is evidence and data.

Once its documented as a real bug then its no longer in the land of weird anecdotes.

How you categorize that is up to you. You can be dismissive of what that bug broke as an "unimportant feature" but its no longer an anecdote.

Good luck with that. Sure it's data, it's the worst possible data you could choose to make an informed decision. If you want to gain insight by selectively reported, highly biased reports of a tiny sample size, go for it.

So the fact that my iPhones wifi failed means that they're all terrible products and we shouldn't look at engineering practices like failure rate statistics?

Or do we just do that for brands we're not fanboys of like __true__ engineers?