Second Sony WH-1000XM6 Hinge Failure

Uh...wtf. Another post on reddit. Very similar failure, the metal piece dislocating from the plastic socket. This is not great optics, especially with the recent Xperia 1 VII issues. Here is what OP wrote:

...the hinge just suddenly broke, no forcing of any kind!

And you can see its not the metal bit thats broken, the hinge actually looks fine, it seems to be the plastic part after the hinge that connects to the earcup.  

...the headphones have been fine right up until now and I've never mistreated them right after dropping my bags, i get the headphones, lift them over my head because L+R were around the wrong way, then the earcup just snapped off as i stretched the band across to get them over my head.  

From my understanding from the post, it looks like the metal piece from the hinge just popped out of the plastic socket. We again lack any actual information if the plastic socket is broken or some piece inside the plastic broke/cracked. The original poster did say they will try to look at the socket to see what is going on.

My question is, is this a failure of the plastic in the support arm, which causes the metal piece to dislocate from the socket? Or is this a design issue? Until we get more information, difficult to say.

I would imagine Sony tested the hinge design during prototyping for such faults no? If your car's door decided to break off after a few months of use, you would be pissed off.

If more and more people start posting such failures, it will kill any market share Sony has gained in the past few years. People will move away from the brand as there will be zero trust. Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.

Here are some additional photos from the post. Hopefully the original poster adds further photos of the plastic pieces to help us understand what happened. Obviously 2 hinge, well swivel, failures look bad, but we have no idea how many have been sold. During manufacturing problems occur and some of these issue make it to consumers, which sucks and is unfortunate. Ideally Sony would contact the owner to determine why this happened and replace their unit free of charge. This would be good optics.

I would love to test the hinge myself, but I do not have the money to drop on the new model. Anyone with the new model, is the swivel area loose? Does it look like it would snap out with normal use? Leave your thoughts in the comments. 

Check out my teardown analysis post to see the hinge design and how it all goes together.