Why did they cancel the product rather than delay it? If they are cancelling the product, either the issues are unfixable and it means that something is very wrong with their engineering, because they are expected to understand whether the product is possible a little bit earlier than some months before production. Or managers are just acting impulsively which is as wrong.

I think if it were delayed, it would still come up from time to time in tech blogs, giving them bad PR, kinda like Duke Nukem Forever. If they announce that it’s cancelled, they take a bad hit now, but they also have indefinite time to work on the product with no PR penalty on delays. The announcement leaves the door open on a future wireless product release anyway, with zero promises.

If they end up releasing the product, say, a year from now, nobody’s going to say “but you cancelled it before!!! how dare you!!”

If they announce in 2017, cancel in 2019, and launch in 2020, people will mock them and will be correct to do so. Maybe if they need three years up to indefinite the cancellation could make sense.

I could imagine something like the project manager had successfully swept all the problems under the rug to that point, despite the fact that the engineering manager was sending emails to compliance and risk management. When it caught on fire, an exec is like "WTF?" and gets a dump of all the data, and cancelling is easy.

Because they've already delayed it a whole lot.

Odd that you'd jump to Samsung as the example and not Apple's own exploding Macbook batteries from a few years back...