Keeping in mind, though, that this is a jellybean part. You're supposed to be able to order "a" 5532 without specifying the supplier, because many vendors produce "a" 5532, and they're all the same. Different vendors' 5532s are supposed to be able to be treated as the same SKU — literally dumped into co-mingled stock in warehouses — with no ill consequence!

(And yes, until TI's recent move, that was true of the 5532. All the other vendors' 5532s had matching datasheet specs, including the 22V max input voltage. Because a design that was built for "a" 5532 was usually built to run it up to 100%; and that a vendor couldn't offer their part as a swap-in if it couldn't do that.)

But now, if your purchasing department (or the supplier they purchase from) happens to order TI 5532s — or if the warehouse they're sourcing from has comingled any TI 5532s into the general 5532 stock — then your product is now broken, with no real recourse except to change your entirely supply chain to one that specifically excludes TI.

MPF102 is my favourite there.

“It’s a JFET” is your only guarantee.

Buy binned parts and design spec spread into it.

> The attitude of the industry is that it’s up to you to read data sheets carefully and test.

Is this backed up by court precedent? This seems like you could easily claim damages due to a differently speccd part.

I’m not doubting that’s how the industry operates, but it seems wrong so I’m curious what is supporting such a dysfunctional form of doing business.

Specs are just that... specs. A 7400 is one thing, but if you designed a circuit that barely avoids oscillating with a 10 MHz GBW, an unsolicited "upgrade" to the opamp that raises its GBW to 12 MHz may be more of a disaster than a favor.

Frankly it's not OK to "upgrade" plain old TTL parts, either, since a faster 7400 might expose a race condition that never caused problems before, or cause EMI problems that didn't exist before.