Sony Recalls 73,000 Vaio Laptops Due To Burn Worry

alphadogg writes "Sony is recalling 73,000 Vaio TZ laptops because of a possible manufacturing defect that may cause them to overheat, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission said Thursday. The recall relates to a problem with wiring near the computer's hinge, which could short-circuit and overheat in certain circumstances, perhaps burning the user. One person has suffered a minor burn as a result of the latest defect, and Sony has received 15 other reports of overheating computers, according to the Commission."

Comments

manufacturing?

[seanadams.com]

The recall relates to a problem with wiring near the computer's hinge, which could short-circuit and overheat in certain circumstances, perhaps burning the user.

That sounds like a design defect, not a manufacturing defect.

Re:Sony

[AKAImBatman]

You joke, but I used to purchase Sony products because they represented quality. Need a top of the line Palm Pilot, CRT, television, laptop, CD player, etc.? Sony was the place to go.

These days Sony's quality IS the joke. :-(

Re:Sony

[Linker3000]

...possibly true for hifi, TVs etc., but having once worked for a Sony laptop repair shop I can say that the evidence suggests they have never really perfected the art of laptop design - bits fall off, break, or the system boards/screens develop early life failures.

We used to repair Sony, Toshiba, Dell, Compaq, IBM etc. and he Sonys were the worse for 'it just happened' faults as opposed to 'I dropped it' or disk failures etc.

I have a question...

[Anonymous Coward]

...as a mathematician with my head in the clouds, I want to ask hardware types: why do things have such horrible failure modes?

Why doesn't a laptop battery do something intelligent way before it explodes, for example? I should expect to be able to short circuit externally or in several places internally and the worst case behaviour be that it blows a fuse, permanently disabling the battery. Why do the vents that are supposed to prevent explosion seem not to trigger until enough pressure has built up that someone directly above/below one is likely to get injured?

In this case, why isn't an impossibly high current draw from anywhere considered reason to shut down the laptop immediately and record such to some hardware event log viewable e.g. from BIOS setup?

Is it really that the few cents it costs to engineer these obvious safety and reliability features aren't worth considering? It's not just for the one in fifty thousand who get injured, but because if my laptop is overdriving my hard drive, for example, I want it to *tell me* way before it destroys it. An ounce of prevention, etc.

Re:Sony

[oldspewey]

Sony inhabits a small but select club for me - companies who's products I outright boycott. Some companies have made it on my list due to shitty products, some due to shitty customer service, some due to shitty business/social/environmental policies, and some due to various combinations of all the above.

I think that I may hate Creative just slightly more than Sony due to profound psychological trauma I suffered as a result of their hardware and drivers ... but Sony ranks right up there.

I remember when Sony used to make good stuff

[pembo13]

What ever happened to that? My dad has a Sony tv that he got around when I was born. When I hit about 12 he got a new Sony tv. And it died, and the old one is still ticking.

Re:I remember when Sony used to make good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Several things.

1. Production was outsourced to China-- to remain cost-competitive, and especially under Sony's now US-executive leadership, most of their products are now made in China. While China's quality has improved tremendously, it was pretty bad at first, and still isn't really up to par with Japan.

2. OEM components-- unlike the days of the Walkman where Sony could've made all the ICs themselves, today if you hope to build a computer, MP3 player, etc at anywhere near an affordable price you have to use commodity components made by someone else that you do not have control over. Consider Apple/Dell/HP and the NVidia mobile GPU failures, for example. Even if Sony wanted to make the highest-quality, made-in-Japan perfection of a notebook they could, they would still only truly make the case, and most of the components would come from OEMs in China whose quality is beyond their control.

3. Competition. Back in the days of the invincible Sony TV, your other choices weren't significantly cheaper. But as non-Japan Far East manufacturing came online, competing products could be offered for so much ridiculously less than what Sony was charging, they had to not only accept a profit margin loss, but begin to make changes to reduce the cost of their products, and quality is part of that.

4. Short product life cycles. Whereas the TV, Walkman, etc were stable designs that were perfected over many years, new technology evolves and changes so quickly that getting a "stable" product line might never quite happen. Even manufacturing techniques are changing rapidly and that too can impact things-- see the XBox 360's high failure rate due to the solder material and technique used, much to MS's surprise.

5. Leadership changes. Sony used to be controlled by Japanese engineers. Now, it is controlled by mostly American marketing/management types who put "media" ahead of quality and technological innovation. This is true for the industry as a whole-- see the demise of HP from a hardcore engineering company to something vaguely resembling the old Packard Bell. In the end, hardcore engineering companies, like the old Sony and HP, happened because people cared about what they were creating and the process that went into it. But what these companies have become was due to people who put short-term profits and the advancement of their own personal careers over all other factors. It is hard to be a technological innovator when you lay off most of your innovators to make the Q2 results look better.

Give Sony Some Credit. This is More than Dell Did

[absent_speaker]

We should give them some credit. Dell ignored their issue until Jarvis really hammered them. I'd seen a least a dozen incidents of dell's starting fires. At least Sony admitted the problem and initiated the recall before their customers started having real issues.