More Exploding Cellphones In The News

adityapandey writes "It's happened again. Yahoo News has another story on exploding cellphones. Most of these mishaps are blamed on counterfeit batteries and chargers. Recently, Kyocera recalled about 40,000 cellphones for free replacement, because of batteries overheating and venting superheated gases. Yet, cellphone makers claim that such incidents are too rare to care about. Shouldn't cellphone companies be making people aware of the hazards of usage?"

Comments

Very Small Percentage

[JPM NICK]

170 million cell phones and 83 reports of cell phones exploding or catching fire in the past two years. 83/170,000,000 = 4.88 x 10^-7. To me, this is way within acceptable margin of error or uncontrollability. Think about how many computer power supplies have shorted out and caught fire (i have had 2 at my job in the last year, and we only have 17 computers). It is a shame, and I am sure it is painful for the people and i do feel bad, but lets not get out of hand with this.

Re:Very Small Percentage

[abulafia]

The companies should do everything they can to prevent catastrophic failures of their products from harming human life. Yes, even if safety means they can't produce tiny products for tiny prices, I still expect them to make their product safe.

You have to define your terms. What does "safe" mean? Does it mean that the product will never harm someone? If so, then the product cannot be produced - there is no such thing as a perfectly safe object.

If you accept that it is acceptable that sold objects can have some margin of risk associated with them, then, yes, your next question comes into play.

If the phones had a 1 out of 500,000 chance of killing someone, would you still be okay with demanding the low price unsafe product?

That depends on the price point for more or less safety, the usage pattern, what exactly the "chance of killing someone" means (e.g., over the lifetime of the product, per use, etc.), and the actual utility of the item.

These are partially actuarial questions, and partially personal utility/economic questions only individuals can make for themselves. There are products out there that have much higher death/serious injury risks associated with them that are happily bought and sold every day (think parachutes and prescription drugs, for starters).

Bruce Schneier has a great quote about this:

More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows just how good we are at evaluating risks.
- Bruce Schneier

Another example: More children drown every year in 5 gallon buckets than due to guns. I see no "million mom marches" against these preventable deaths, even though safety features could be thought up to prevent bucket drownings at significantly less cost-per-unit than some of the features proposed for guns. (Sorry, I couldn't find a reference for that figure on buckets online - I read it in the Economist some time back.)

If you don't accept that safety is an economic tradeoff, you'll never be able to make rational choices about safety.

(For my part, I hate cell phones, so I don't have one because the (negative) utility of the product is certainly not worth the cost - no risk analysis needed.)

Too rare to care about?

[downward dog]

83 cell phones have exploded or caught fire--but there are millions that haven't, so it is not a big deal.

Hmmm... How well did that logic work against Ephedra or Firestone Wilderness AT tires?

Re:Too rare to care about?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

...Or the Ford Pinto, or the Chevy Corvair...