FOIA Documents Detail iPods Overheating, Catching Fire

suraj.sun passes along a report from a Seattle TV station that has been investigating reports of Apple iPods overheating and bursting into flames. "An exclusive KIRO 7 Investigation reveals an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke, injuring people and damaging property. It's an investigation that Apple has apparently been trying to keep out of the public eye. It took more than 7 months for KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy to get her hands on documents concerning Apple's iPods from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because Apple's lawyers filed exemption after exemption. In the end, the CPSC released more than 800 pages which reveal, for the very first time, a comprehensive look that shows, on a number of occasions, iPods have suddenly burst into flames, started to smoke, and even burned their owners. ... Apple refused to comment, and refused to answer all of the other questions [the reporter] has been asking of the company since November."

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[drinkypoo]

Apple failed to correctly implement the CMD IDE chip used in the Revision 1 B&W G3 macintoshes. They used to have a techinfo library entry that told you to buy FWB toolkit or an IDE card to fix the problem. (FWB toolkit would let you force the drive to PIO mode, at which point it's about half as fast and requires more CPU intervention, but UDMA is what Apple screwed up.) When the merged the TIL into the new Knowledge Base they omitted this article; there are earlier and later articles. I used to have the TIL number, and you can search the KB by TIL number and find things, but only if they are there.

Apple customers are mushrooms, they are only happy as long as you keep the in the dark and feed them shit. If people at large had longer memories and more geek awareness they might still not avoid them, but they would stop paying a premium for what is after all essentially the same experience you get from anyone else: a bloated, chunky, choppy operating system (sometime compare NeXTStep on an '040 Turbo slab to OSX running on a Dual core anything, and be depressed) extremely wasteful of resources running on simple motherboards built by Foxconn and populated with simple commodity parts.