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.
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?
anecdotal evidence is what I usually base my purchases on, which is why I've never bought a Google device after being burned (literally) by the Nexus 6P battery issues.
you can pretend it doesn't matter, but bad word of mouth is all it takes for me.
A quick search turns up problems, enough so that, as a consumer, I'd be concerned. Is that hard enough data to reach a conclusion in a major scientific journal? No.
Is it enough data so that, as a consumer looking to purchase one, I would be concerned? Probably.
Is it enough data that I'd expect some engineer at Google (or wherever) to pay attention and address? Certainly, I would expect some engineering team to pay attention to public forums and address issues as they arise. It doesn't seem to be happening. If these phones are supposed to be a flagship items, and I think it's reasonable to claim that they are, it's also reasonable to expect flagship support.
But who is going to have the data that we need to assess this?
The firm that has an interest in everyone thinking there's no data, and that we should withhold judgement.
There's not a lot of good choices here, either you assume that because there's no info, everything is fine, or you assume that the one guy complaining is one of many.
