You're underestimating Apple's meticulous planning, which has only become more intense in the Cook era. Bad feature/UX or not, each one of those decisions was calculated.

Read this ars quote from 2010 [0]:

>Apple used the small part—one that is not integral to the device’s functionality—to see if the company was capable or producing a custom design to Apple’s specifications. Typically, manufacturers prefer to have at least two sources for parts, so that a supply problem from one supplier won’t halt manufacturing. Since Liquidmetal is only available from one source, Apple needed to make sure the company could deliver.

For Apple Silicon, there was no way they'd make the switch in one go, so they had to figure out a way to hedge that bet. That's what the TouchBar really was, with all its warts and solutions for problems nobody had.

And as someone else in this thread pointed out, the first custom cellular chip wasn't released with a flagship model - they exclusively paired it with the budget iPhone 16e.

Apple is always calculating and hedging.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/08/apple-tested-liquidm...